Art: Style Was Key

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What's more, a sense of humor--even of irreverence--began to seep into religious imagery. Witness a marvelous ink painting of vegetables by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800). You can read it, with pleasure, as a supremely assured market still life (Jakuchu was, in fact, a vegetable wholesaler before he turned to painting full time). Gourds, melons, turnips, ears of corn and a shiitake mushroom surround an enormous forked white radish, lying as if in state on a basket. But as Singer points out, an educated 18th century Japanese would have recognized this as a parody of a familiar religious image--the parinirvana, or scene of the dead Buddha encircled by a crowd of his mourning disciples. You only need to try to imagine a Western equivalent to this--a deposition from the cross, say, with Christ as a carrot--to realize what a gulf lay between Buddhist and Christian attitudes. Part of Jakuchu's point is that his image is not merely blasphemous, and was not thought to be: radishes, like all other living things, have their Buddha nature. And yet it's funny--as much of a joke as one of the Zen classics in the show: Sengai Gibon's beatifically smiling frog in meditation.

During the Edo period, traders, moneylenders and shopkeepers were getting richer--the Tokugawas sealed Japan off from Western contacts but emphatically not from trade with other parts of Asia. They wanted conspicuous works of art and had the money to commission them. The demand for superfine objects, in which ordinary things like writing boxes or game boards were raised to the condition of art by means of exquisite decoration, was underwritten by the Japanese convention of giving gifts--as tribute, tokens of loyalty, signs of gratitude. The gift was a much more important social symbol in Japan than in the West, and the circulation of luxury objects fostered a level of design and craftsmanship that was, by modern Western standards, almost unimaginably high.

Meanwhile, the upper samurai class, now that Japan was politically unified, had less butchery to do and more time to spend on matters of high culture, especially the observance of form in such areas as calligraphy, the "way" of tea and the artifacts that were tied into it, ceremonial dress, and brush painting linked to the imported cult of Zen Buddhism. Some of the most memorable samurai objects in this show could not have had much military use; they are kawari kabuto, spectacular parade helmets--the ancestors of Darth Vader's mask--worn to impress the living daylights out of commoners. The variety of shapes the helmets came in was mind-boggling. Some of them referred to family crests, but many seem to be sheer fantasy in the form of carps' tails, clamshells, whirlpools, morning glories, fans, bats' ears or crabs. A great example in this show purports to represent a mountain with two valleys, its surface covered with silver leaf, now blackened with age: pure sculpture for the head.