The Lords Of the Brush

Japanese Masters' Graceful Works Mirror Ideals of the Edo Era

For the beauty-loving samurai of 18th-century Japan, those competitive aestheticians, true mastery of ink and edge were arts of the same height.

Slicing through a torso with a curving steel blade and putting ink to silk with a liquid-loaded brush, both of these were stroke arts. Both required the same swiftness, the same lack of indecision. For the master of the brush and the master of the blade, who were sometimes the same person, the flawless stroke expressed a Japanese ideal -- the beauty-governed union of sure, unhurried speed and centuries-old tradition, utter self-assurance and Zen purity of mind.

You see what they were getting at in "Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters From the Price Collection," which has just come to the Sackler Gallery. It springs out of the paintings, these folding screens and hanging scrolls, these records of the moving brush, its puddlings, its swoops, its extraordinary markings, rigorous yet free.

This show of Edo pictures was last year the most successful museum exhibition touring the planet. In Japan, nearly 900,000 people paid to see it. In terms of mass attendance, no Western show came close.

One reason it succeeded so well is that it came as a surprise. Edo-era art had long been undervalued. Even among scholars, even in Japan, eccentric Edo pictures (many painted at a time when Thomas Jefferson was in knee britches) used to be regarded as too new and too peculiar, not traditional enough. For many Japanese, the Price collection's pictures seemed to come out of the blue, or at least out of the sticks. For 30 years they'd languished, generally ignored, way out in the prairies, in the middle of an oil patch in Bartlesville, Okla.

Whereby hangs a story, a good American story.

Here's how it begins:

So, Joe Price and Frank Lloyd Wright are walking down the street . . .

The street is Madison Avenue. The year is 1953. Almost everyone knows Wright, the great American architect, but almost no one knows Price. Wright is in his 80s and coming to the end of his fiercely individualistic, uncompromising journey, but Price is in his 20s still, and his is just beginning. They're friends.

They're friends because young Price had gotten the architect a job.

The job had come because Harold Price Sr., the oil pipeline baron, was planning a building and looking for an architect, and his importuning son kept "pestering" his father to "at least consider Mr. Wright."

"To keep me quiet," Price wrote, "my father finally consented. He wanted a one- or two-story building spread out on the prairie. Mr. Wright suggested a 14-story tower. They compromised on 19."