The Lords Of the Brush
Japanese Masters' Graceful Works Mirror Ideals of the Edo Era

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, November 15, 2007

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."

The Price Tower in Bartlesville, a thing of copper cladding and cantilevered floors, was completed in 1956. The process wasn't easy. The architect and the oilman were frequently at loggerheads. Young Price was their go-between. "They'd roar at me," he remembers, "but once they were in the same room, both tigers became pussycats."

Price, incidentally, knows quite a lot about tigers. His show is full of them. Those symbols of the warrior's way glare out of his paintings, but despite their fangs and growls, they also tend to look a little bit like pussycats. Living tigers were unknown to Edo painters. None had reached the islands. The Japanese had seen only their skins.

Anyway, young Price and old Wright have just explored the site of the Guggenheim Museum, and now they're on a stroll. They stop in an art gallery. Wright looks, as he often does, at Japanese woodblock prints. His companion is attracted by something else entirely. Displayed on the wall is a monochrome hanging scroll.

"Grapevines" is an early work by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800). Price has never heard of him. But he notes that the picture's leaves have been painted without outlines, only with wet washes, in the so-called "boneless" manner, and that none of the tall painting's tightly twisting tendrils and interwoven vines have been allowed to cross. So he buys it.

"Grapevines" was Price's first Jakuchu. In time, that Edo artist would become his favorite painter, and he'd acquire many more. Some 20 of his Jakuchus -- powerful and curious images of tigers, elephants, cranes, plum blossoms, eagles and waving reeds in snow -- have been selected for the show.

For a while his art was called the Shin'enKan Collection after Jakuchu's studio ("The House of the Tranquil Heart"), though later he'd rename it the Etsuko and Joe Price Collection, in honor of his wife.

In Japan, Joe Price is known as "the American who rediscovered Jakuchu." Strangers bow to him in the street.

From the start, the man was hooked. During the next half-century, the Prices would acquire about 900 more Edo paintings.

One hundred and nine of them will be displayed at the Sackler, but not all at once. To protect them from the light, and to give them space to breathe, the paintings will be rotated during the exhibit's five-month run.

* * *

"Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes" opens with midwinter. The light, already dim, is slowly growing dimmer. Two six-panel folding screens, both scenes of snowy night, shine on the broad wall.

In the painting on the left, a pair of magpies cackle round a plum tree. A rabbit climbs a pine in the picture on the right. Katsu Jagyoku (1735-1780) painted these dreamy images in 1774. Countless floating snowflakes fill his painted air.

These screens, says Price, recall an old duality. Crows suggest the sun in Japanese tradition, while rabbits evoke the moon.

"Where you see the man in the moon," he says, "the Japanese see a rabbit. My wife has been trying to show it to me for the past 40 years."

Rabbits don't climb up pine trees. But the moon does. Very slowly the room darkens. This is not an optical illusion. The lighting has been programmed. The darker it gets, the more the rabbit's whiteness glows. Stable, bright museum light does no favors to such pictures, which were painted to be seen, says Price, by candlelight or charcoal light or sunshine cooled and softened by translucent paper walls.

Price is 77, and enthusiastic. His eyes sparkle. His hair is shoulder-length and gray.

"Edo" is a fluid term. The word signifies a place -- the city now called Tokyo -- and a new ebullient style and 2 1/2 centuries, the period that began in 1615 when Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) became, beneath the emperor, the absolute ruler of Japan.

Much changed during the shogunate. A sort of peace prevailed. The samurai, required now to leave their country castles and attend their lord in Edo, became increasingly exquisite. The merchant classes prospered, and became exquisite, too. The decorative arts -- embroidery, ceramics, woodworking and lacquer work, cookery and perfumery -- flourished with prosperity, as did gift-giving and dressing up and generally showing off. One Edo cookbook illustrates 55 different ways to cut and display carp.

Hierarchical Japan respects its noble past. Old traditions were not broken in the Edo era -- in Japan that wasn't done -- but they were stretched.

Glowering on the wall is the ferocious monk Daruma, the legendary founder of the discipline of Zen. His eyes bulge. His brow is furrowed, his chest hairy. He's furious. Similarly intense are the coarse, impatient brush strokes of his gold-embroidered robe. Daruma dares the viewer to conquer self-deception. But it's hard to take him seriously. Paintings of this sort were once religious objects. This one is a party piece. According to the wooden box in which this scroll is stored, it was painted at a banquet by Kawanabe Kyosai, a slightly comic painter invited to the dinner to entertain the guests.

Samurai aren't funny, nor are geisha, nor are fish. But Joe Price often smiles as he proceeds through his show and explains its painted jokes. In an early Edo hanging scroll by Watanabe Shiko (1683-1755), a carp swims up a waterfall, something those bottom-dwelling, sluggish fish are not known to do. "It is said," says Price, "that a carp who ascends a waterfall becomes a dragon." The picture's true subject isn't wildlife, it's social climbing. The striving fish is gasping; he has a long, long way to go.

Nearby, a focused monkey -- by Mori Sosen (1747-1821) -- attempts to catch a wasp. This image, explains Price, spins a complex pun: The words for "wasp" and "fiefdom" (hachi and hochi) rhyme, as do the ideograms for "monkey" and "lord." Should your lord grant you a fiefdom, look out, you might be stung.

That not everyone will get the joke doesn't really matter. What makes the work a marvel is the monkey's painted fur. Sosen painted monkeys so often, and so wondrously, that his contemporaries thought he must be a reincarnation of a Japanese macaque.

Such shifts of focus happen often. You stop thinking about subjects, about waterfalls or wasps, and find yourself astounded time and time again by the markings of a brush -- by the elegant striations of Suzuki Kiitsu's clamshells, or the pooling grays and copper greens of those poppy stems in grass.

Price doesn't know who painted them. No one does. He bought the painting anyway. It brought pleasure to his eye.

"It is good to see it here. When I first began collecting, I'd find my way to Washington, to the Freer Gallery, where they'd take me to the basement and into the storage rooms and show me Edo painting. I remember my wonderment," he says.