Art: Style Was Key

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Skill, once demonstrated, could be elegantly volatilized. Edo taste valued the unfinished, the rough. One of the masters of the pictorial throwaway line was Ogata Kenzan, best known as a potter. He and his more famous brother Ogata Korin--whose paintings mark the apotheosis of lyrical, erudite Edo painting--left an indelible mark on Edo style. Nothing could seem more offhand than Kenzan's scroll The Eight-Fold Bridge, an illustration of a poem with the poem itself written into it--the planks of the bridge brusquely indicated, the calligraphy mingling with the broadly brushed leaves of water iris as if it too were part of the reed growth of the pond. And yet the whole image has an iron control within its spontaneity. This casual rightness of design cannot be feigned. It was rooted in the desire to understand nature by becoming part of nature. And Edo art, at its best, was all about that: the fusion of nature and culture, at a level of craft that is now lost to the world, East or West.