Art: Style Was Key

Half the population of Washington may still be lining up to see the Van Gogh show, but the exhibition that Vincent himself, as an obsessed lover of Japanese art, would most likely be heading for hangs in another part of the National Gallery of Art. It is "Edo: Art in Japan 1615-1868," a magnificent selection of nearly 300 works in every medium, from woodblock prints to lacquerware, from tiny netsuke to eight-fold painted screens, assembled by the American scholar Robert Singer and mostly lent by Japanese institutions. It is replete with objects listed in Japan as "National Treasures" and "Important Cultural Properties," many of which have never been seen outside Japan until now. No Edo show of such range or quality has been attempted in the U.S. before, and this one succeeds brilliantly.

"Edo" was both a place and a time frame. It was the old name of the city we call Tokyo, and "Edo period" denotes the 2 1/2 centuries during which an absolute regime, founded there in the early 17th century by the military lord, or shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, ruled over all Japan through 15 generations of his descendants. The symbolic moment at which the period began to close was 1853, when Commodore Perry's black ships, crewed by their blue-eyed, spindle-nosed, strange-smelling gaijin, the Americans, sailed into lower Edo Bay and broke the seal of isolation from the West that the Tokugawa dynasty had imposed on Japan for so long.

It is not true, however, that Japan had been culturally static until then. Japan's ancient imperial capital Kyoto represented the classic division of old Japanese power: court, samurai, priests. It continued to exert a great influence on the country's art. But in Edo, a more secular and even demotic imagination began to assert itself--marked, writes Singer, by "bold, sometimes brash expression...and a playful outlook on life in general." This happened because Japanese society, in the new capital, became somewhat more open to change. Not very much, but a little, and then a little more. The once despised merchants and entrepreneurs, and other commoners too, were developing their own tastes. They became an important cultural force. So did a kind of city mentality. Edo Japan saw a great expansion of popular culture in its new capital, from the "high" forms of No and Bunraku theater to every sort of comedy and mime and burlesque as well.

These, like the doings of sumo wrestlers and high-class prostitutes, gave a rich subject matter to 18th century graphic artists like Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and the theater caricaturist Toshusai Sharaku, whose image of the actor Otani Oniji III playing a samurai's manservant, all red-rimmed eyes and stylish snarl, is a deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido are both travelogues and social listings, in which every sort of occupation, from pit sawing to innkeeping, gets its allotted description. This scrutiny of lower-class life would never have held so much interest to an earlier Japan. Manga, images of common life, are the direct ancestors of the modern Japanese comic strip.