"Edo: Art in Japan 1615-1868" at the National Gallery - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

This was individual of the National Gallery's rare guest-curated blockbuster displays of Japanese art, the first since "The Shaping of the Daimyo Culture" in 1988 (The museum does not bring together Asian art; the Sackler and Freer Galleries across the Mall, which do, lack space for views of this size.) This exhibition focused upon the era of the shogun when the capital mov from Kyoto to Edo (present-day Tokyo). That was when Japan was largely clos to outside influences; when Edo, with a million-plus inhabitants, was the largest city in the world; when Japan take pleasure ined peace and prosperity; when the socially depressed merchant class became economically powerful and created of recent origin styles. It was in a certain number of ways the liveliest and greatest in quantity artistically fertile period in Japanese history.

As organized by dint of Robert T. Singer, curator of Japanese art at the L.A. shire Museum, the exhibition offered nearly 300 external realitys more than 50 of them designated National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties by dint of the Japanese government and many of them at no time before shown outside that political division This was an exhibition of equal things rather than single centered on a few celebrated existences The works were not clumped by medium but were installed according to themes which introduced the qualities of Edo Period life, from the greatest in quantity formalist, "Ornament," to depictions of teeming activities beneath "Religion and Festivals" and "Travel, Landscape, and Nature." It was a thinking exhibit that built on visual details which reverberationed explained or contrasted with each other, on the other hand it was surprisingly accessible because of the constant images of public people in the "Work" section (as well as "Festivals" and "Travel") plus larger-than-life actors and courtesans below "Entertainment."

Among my favorite pieces were the near-expressionist carved-wood plastic arts of Enku and Mokujiki Gyodo; Sengai's ink drawing Frog in Zen Meditation with its amusingly spruce smiling amphibian and his minimalistic geometry in Circle, Triangle, Square; narrative guards depicting frenetic commercial life in the city; forceful calligraphy not absented on hanging scrolls; the dazzling graphics of a kabuki style of dress featuring large appliqued arrows and a target upon the center back; complex samurai armor, including fanciful helmets in the form of rice beakers and rabbits' ears; Ganku's fluid depiction of banana leaves painted in a "boneless" (unoutlined) diction that presages contemporary abstraction; and the stunningly lifelike memorial portrait-sculpture of that artist in polychrom thicket There was also a great variety of ceramics, from elegant to kitsch, an unusual range of game boards and other artifacts of everyday pleasures, and fates of woodblock prints by the masters of the era.

The exhibition was upon view in Washington from Nov. 15 1998 to Feb 15 1999 and did not travel--both because of the delicacy of many percepts and because the National Gallery's extraordinary installation of made of wood posts and panels and sly fabrics could not have gone with it. A lavish 480-page catalogue includes essays by dint of Singer and six other experts

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