THE YIN AND YANG
Provocative worlds appear in Japanese art exhibits.
Japan may be cramped, with a capital city whose population exceeds 13 million people, but its artists have embraced an expansive aesthetic for centuries.
Aside from their country of origin, the works in a pair of shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston come off first as yin and yang; one floating amid golden clouds, the other tethered to Earth in gray, black and white. Until you stand back. Both feature numerous works on a large scale.
The contemplative “Unfolding Worlds” juxtaposes 25 screens from the Edo and Meiji periods (1615 to 1912) with 35 bold contemporary ceramics. All are from the internationally known Gitter-Yelen Collection in New Orleans. Screens were the monumental paintings of their day, with an architectural, three-dimensional quality.
They typically came in pairs, each with six panels, so they could be employed as movable walls. Even folded shut for storage, they’d be hard to squeeze into many Japanese homes today.
Beginning about 50 years and two atomic bombs later, the groundbreaking “A New World to Come” contains a mind-boggling array of 250 works that represent just one wildly transformational decade,
the 1970s. Including photography, video, painting and sculpture, it illuminates how 29 Japanese artists and photographers used cameras as experimental tools following a time of radical social change. Many of the works dwarf viewers, including huge grids of photo-based collages.
‘Unfolding Worlds’
Dr. Kurt Gitter and his wife, Alice Yelen Gitter, were awed by the MFAH space.
“Seventeen thousand square feet is a lot of institution for temporary exhibits,” Kurt Gitter said.
“Unfolding Worlds” originated with fewer screens and no ceramics at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem last year. It’s displayed in the Upper Brown Pavilion, with a view encompassing the huge tapestries of the “Spectacular Rubens” show below.
Kurt Gitter has loved Japanese culture since the early 1960s, when he served two years on the island of Kyushu as a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon. He immediately appreciated the beauty of Zen calligraphy because he knew the artists of the New York School who were influenced by it; he’d spent Friday nights partying with his friend Philip Pearlstein and the Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.
Gitter returned to Japan in 1969 as an expert on retinal surgery and began collecting more seriously, photographing what he saw at galleries, taking notes and learning from dealers, scholars and fellow Americans. He amassed about 700 works from the Zenga, Nanga, Rinpa, Maruyama-Shijo and Ukiyoe schools as well as paintings by master “eccentrics,” 20th-century paintings and ceramics.
The collection resides at the Gitter-Yelen Art Study Center. Gitter didn’t realize it held 29 screens until the Jerusalem museum asked for a dedicated show. His intent was simply to collect Japanese art, he said.
He bought screens along the way because he saw them as “a primary canvas, beautiful to look at and somewhat available,” he explained. “I don’t think if I’d been to Japan before World War II and had money, these screens would have been offered to me.”
Many of the screens date to the Edo period (1615-1868), when they were commissioned for the homes and castles of feudal lords. The merchant class continued the tradition during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when cities filled and the arts flourished.
While screens occasionally served as diplomatic gifts to Westerners, few left the country during the centuries Japan was closed to Westerners. Everything changed after World War II, and the market opened up. But the tradition of making screens declined, and after a few decades of collecting by Westeners, quality works are now hard to acquire.
Gitter pointed to the magnificent “Scenes In and Around the Capital,” from about 1700. “Probably hundreds of these were made for the most upper-class people. How did this one end up in the hands of a doctor who’s self-made? Only because of circumstances that happened over the last 100 years.”
Suda Kokuta’s 1986 “Calligraphy Screen,” the most recently made screen in the show, is deliberately messy and small enough to sit atop a table.
Alice Gitter loves the cleverness of masterpieces designed to be viewed from various angles. The six panels of older works read like slender stand-alone paintings when a screen is displayed accordionstyle. But when it’s fully open and flat, a continuous scene plays out.
The screens also reveal an incredibly rich cultural history. Some illustrate stories like “Tales of the Genji” or offer vistas of ancient cities teeming with people as they celebrate holidays, attend Kabuki theater or gather tea leaves. Other screens have a more auspicious purpose, sweeping viewers into heavenly worlds of misty waterfalls, dragons and tigers or celebrating nature and the seasons, imbued with symbolic nuances. The realistic birds of Watanabe Nangaku’s two-panel “Red-Crowned Cranes,” for example, were associated with longevity and good fortune.
Screens made for the wealthiest patrons shimmer with layers of gold leaf, which also had a practical application: Before electricity was available, they helped draw natural light, even moonlight, into dark rooms. Moodier, monochromatic screens sparkle in a completely different way. They’re full of virtuosic, gestural brush work and lush ink washes that innovatively use negative space: A waterfall emerges with just a few long strokes; hundreds of tiny irregular dabs appear as fluttering leaves.
Perhaps museum curator Christine Starkman sensed viewers might drift away in ecstasy without some grounding. She chose the show’s contemporary ceramics with an eye toward sculptural forms and diverse glazing techniques, from rough to refined. They’re a fine complement to the screens.
‘For a New World to Come’
In the museum’s Beck Building, videos and wall-eating assemblages from the 1970s immerse viewers in noisier ways.
An open Japan, like the rest of the world, changed during the 1960s; then a big bubble burst and the nation began to promote itself as utopian and advanced, said associate photography curator Yasufumi Nakamori.
He and curatorial assistant Allison Pappas have spent three years dispelling a notion that avant-gardism died in Japan after the ’60s. They’re rewriting some art history, actually: Reframing Japan as a participant in the global push toward conceptualism, tracing a transition from kindai (the modern) to gendai (the contemporary) in works by 29 artists who used cameras as tools from 1968 to 1979.
Many of these works have never been seen in the U.S. Most have never been shown together, even in Japan.
“For a New World to Come” builds on research the museum began with Ann Wilkes Tucker’s landmark 2003 show, “The History of Japanese Photography.”
“It really makes you reconsider what you think you know about the ’70s,” said MFAH photography curator Malcolm Daniel.
Toshio Matsumoto’s 1968 film “For the Damaged Right Eye” sets the dynamic tone. Composed with three 16 mm projectors and found sounds, it documents underground scenes, including a transvestite’s life and airport protests with a flurry of imagery, a sensory overload. Its premiere was the first live “multi-projection” event in Japan.
While political and social protests were winding down in the late ’60s and early ’70s, photography’s revolution was just beginning. Artists such as Daido Moriyama didn’t care about pretty pictures and sharp focus. They aimed to make visual poetry.
“Ideas were more important than craftsmanship. They were using cameras to sculpt time,” Nakamori said.
Because no galleries for photography yet existed, artists showed their images in books and magazines such as the influential but very shortlived journal Provoke.
Takuma Nakahira, one of Provoke’s founders, was interested in photography’s relationship to language. Nakamori considers him one of the show’s most important artists. He derived the show’s title from Nakahira’s 1970 book, “For a Language to Come.”
Japan’s artists didn’t take long to cross the divide between “art” and “photography,” as Nakahiri and others incorporated their lens work with performance, painting and sculpture.
Nakamori re-created Nakahira’s large 1970 photo mural “Circulation: Date. Place. Events,” which dominates the show’s second gallery. It’s vastly edited; the original involved more than 1,400 pictures Nakahira snapped during eight days in Paris and tacked to a bulletin board; at the time, that was a new “installation strategy,” Nakamori said.
Performance artist and sculptor Keiji Uematsu re-created one of his early installations for the show. It features a large column of wooden beams squeezed between a red clamp and the ceiling. A series of large photographs shows how Uematsu once used the beams to explore the visible and invisible space in buildings.
Jiro Takamatsu, one of Japan’s most important post-war artists, absorbed ideas from photography into paintings and sculpture. His large “Shadow (Double Shadow of a Baby)” makes you think your eyes are playing tricks on you. Propped in a corner next to the painting, his small sculpture “Light and Shadow,” reverses that effect with just a light bulb and a small metal panel.
Most monumental of all is Nomura Hitoshi’s “Time on a Curved Line,” a 1970 assemblage of 34 gelatin silver prints. It should be viewed not as photography but as an object, recommended visiting expert Yuri Mitsuda, an art critic and the chief curator at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, in Chiba, Japan.
Mitsuda said while Hitoshi made his assemblage from photographs taken during a day’s drive through Tokyo (each shot has a time stamp to prove it), his objective wasn’t to record the event. He was interested in the materiality of photography, a new medium to help construct new says of seeing.
There’s much more to explore in “For a New World to Come.” The show consumes seven galleries, loosely organized into early underground imagery, conceptual photographs, works by artists who embraced repetition and copying with machines other than cameras, art that points toward the 1980s, and casual representation more akin to today’s style.
Some of the works are on loan from other institutions and collectors. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo owns five major works in the show that have not previously left Japan. They will only be seen in Houston, although the rest of the exhibition travels to two New York venues in September and October.
The MFAH purchased 44 of Nakamori’s discoveries.
“Otherwise, the catalog becomes a shopping list for other museums,” Daniel said. “We wanted to take advantage of the connections Yasufumi made and the research he did before he told everybody else where to go for it.”