Happy 300th, Jakuchu

I remember being told once - by an art teacher, speaking in the way that cultural pedants often do, that Ito jakuchu was popular with westerners because he was easy to understand, while 'real' Japanese appreciated a more unique expression of their cultural heritage.


If we put aside the fact that Jakuchu was one of the most popular painters of his time, (although it is also true that his name and works were rescued from obscurity partly through the efforts of the American art collector, Joe Price), the number of visitors at the show of Jakuchu's work, Jakuchu and Kyoto, that was on at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art from November to December of this year, certainly puts the lie to that assertion.

Numbered or timed ticketting has not been adopted here, so if you want to visit a popular exhibition, you take your chances and line up (if you're unlucky) or otherwise shuffle round at a dismal speed with the crowds, or flit around some metres away from the glass, hoping to find a gap that allows more than a glimpse of the works.

 Although I didn't have to queue, this was the most crowded exhibition I have been to for a long time, and so I opted for the latter.


I flitted past the rows of chickens and cranes and concentrated on just a couple of works - mainly just one, in fact , Elephant and Whale, which I had never seen in the flesh before, and which was the main reason for my visit.

Jakuchu may fairly be calleds a master of ink - the effects he could obtain through brushwork, both careful and dynamic, and with variations in the type of ink itself, make the term 'monochrome' a misnomer. This  painting is a good example: although it is executed in shades of ink, to say it is black and white or grey is not an adequate description. The ink has produced a warm and glowing surface that is as alive or perhaps even more so, than his coloured works.

On the left of the pair of six leaved screens the dark form of a whale ploughs through the sea, the smooth line of it's back visible against the wave forms so distinctive of Jakuchu - a powerful jet of water blasts upwards, disappearing out of the picture, to be answered by the trumpetting call of the elephant in the other screen (or at least, a friendly-looking wave of its trunk). Between them lies the sea, like a snowy wasteland.

Indeed, visually, it is very much like a field of snow, gently undulating pale greys, a neutral field on which the action is set. Anyone familiar with Jakuchu's work will be aware of the amount of detail he could cram into his pictures; however, his black and white works tended to leave the background white. Yet this blankness served as a field on which the imagination may project the background he did not paint himself, like an afterimage. His larger works, typically, do not use this approach. Perhaps he judged the size was too great, and perhaps he sought to avoid the deadening effect of such large patches being left unfilled. In fact, his larger works often show extreme attention to enlivening the background, for preserving it as a living field, showing an almost tactile concern with what might otherwise be 'dead space'. This is most evident in his mosaic inspired and 'pointillist' works. While being less satisfying as paintings, this aspect is very much in evidence, and The Elephant and Whale seems, in a less defined (and less exacting way) to follow suit.

Close up of the waves in the 'Whale'

Jakuchu's later works seemed to lose none of the dynamism of his earlier years, perhaps because he came into his own as a painter sometime in his forties, but uncharacteristic traces of underpainting and overlap in brushstrokes may be seen in the left hand (whale) screen. This is always interesting, as it allows the viewer a better idea of the artist's process of working. In smaller pieces, there is almost no sign of the initial lines drawn in pale ink - they have been covered over precisely by subsequent painting, leaving only what the artist wanted to be seen.

This cannot be seen as a lessening of the artist's powers – the fine work on the right hand screen, including the elephants eye and the leaves above its head, show as perfect a degree of control as any of his earlier pieces – the roughness on the whale side is something else, perhaps an expression of the raw power of the leviathan.

Whales are not often depicted in Japanese art - Jakuchu painted at least one other version of this screen himself – an entry for a 1928 catalogue of the Osaka Art Club includes this picture:

I have also seen a small version of the whale by one of his admirers/pupils. I think Jakuchu touches something quite deep with his painting, perhaps mores than many of his other works, and is well worth making the time to seek out and enjoy.

2016 – Year of the Monkey

I'm not sure of the painter, but possibly Muromachi Period

Wishing all the readers of Ichijoji a Happy New Year for 2016.

As it is the Year of the Monkey (which starts today in Japan), if you want a little background on monkeys, I wrote about Musashi's use of monkey symbolism previously (and also at Musashi's Monkey Design 1 and Musashi's Monkey Design 2).

I will be writing a little more about monkeys in Japanese painting shortly, but for now, a little help for those who fancy doing a little artwork themselves (Courtesy of the British Museum)…



The finished version might look something like this, by Ito Jakuchu:

The Prince and the Greengrocer

This is the poster from the current exhibition at the Kyoto Sen-Oku Hakuko-kan, the home of the Sumitomo Collection in Kyoto (They have a Tokyo branch, too). The show consists mainly of paintings from the Ming and early Ching dynasties, although you might be forgiven for thinking that the image on the poster had slipped in from elsewhere. What were the Chinese literati doing painting cute puppies anyway?

Despite it's amazingly contemporary look, it was actually painted over 400 years ago by the painter known as Bada Shanren. An album of his smaller paintings is one of the treasures of the collection, and is usually exhibited in the early autumn, with a different painting being on show every few weeks as the leaves in the album are turned over.

Bada Shanren is classified as an eccentric (at the very least), and was regarded as certifiably crazy by his contemporaries. Whether he genuinely suffered from mental illness or was just faking it to avoid persecution from the incoming Manchu rulers (he was a member of the Ming royal family) is something tht we cannot know for sure, although modern opinion seems to tend more to the latter view. He entered a monastery, where he lived for more than forty years, before emerging to live as a wandering painter.

Bada Shanren - Sumitomo Collection

His work is characterized by the simplicity of its elements, coupled with a strong expressiveness and, to our modern eyes, a certain cuteness and whimsical humour which perhaps served to cover, as well as express, the bitterness he is known to have felt towards the new rulers of China.

In Japan, he is best known for these simple compositions, but other collections have works that are larger and more complex, and which give a better idea of the range of his abilities.

It is hard not to be struck by the similarities to works by Ito Jakuchu, a Japanese painter also labelled as an eccentric, but with a very different background. Jakuchu was the son and heir of a prosperous greengrocer in Kyoto, but found little sense of achievment in his work and gave it up to his brother to become a full-time painter. It was his love of the natural world which inspired him, not hate of an invading regime.

Comparing works such as Bada Shanren's Two Eagles (above) with many of Jakuchu's paintings of chickens (a typical example below, but here are others where the composition is much closer),  the similarities, both in the composition and brush use are inescapable. Bada Shanren characteristically made extensive use of short, choppy horizontal brushstrokes - I had long noticed the slightly jarring effect of these in Jakuchu's work - but whether or not he was familiar with the Chinese painter's work, I don't know. I have never seen any mention of it, but given that he lived in Kyoto, the capital, and was well-connected in the art world, particularly with centres of artistic connisseurship such as Shokoku-ji, make it possible.

Another painting on display, by Niu Shihui (1625-1672) bore even more Jakuchuesque qualities - this was less surprising after I discovered he was Bada Shanren's brother, who shared his monastic life, and hatred of the Qing. Interestingly, he signed his name so it looked like 'Never bowing down in my lifetime'. This is, of course, taking nothing away from Jakuchu's stature as a painter - the use of models was standard practice in all schools of painting of the time.

A typical Jakuchu cockerel

Looking at works by Jakuchu, and later, the larger ones by Bada Shanren, a couple of points struck me as particularly interesting. As always with art, viewing the actual pieces is a very different experience from seeing reproductions in books. Over the years, I have seen pieces by Jakuchu many times. perhaps to the point of becoming slightly blasé about them.

This time, however, I had been looking at a room of exquisite sumi-e landscapes, mainly from the Muromachi period, mostly small in scale, but including a 6 panel screen by Kano Masanobu, founder of the Kano School. I had left the Jakuchu pieces, till last, so as not to interfere with my appreciation of the other pieces.

When I got to them, I was surprised to find they displayed an invisible depth that I hadn't appreciated before. It was an odd sensation, almost like an optical illusion, like the after image you get from looking at something bright for a while and then shifting your gaze to something darker. But it was not a sensation of the eyes, but of the mind. In that white space behind the clear graphic images of rocks, birds, insects and plants was a definite sense of the subtle, modulated greys of a traditional sumi-e landscape. Not really visible, but a definite sense of possibilities, rather like the sense of an unknown but present world you get when reading a fantasy novel, before the author fully fleshes out the world for you.

It was a pleasant surprise for me, because a similar image is often used to describe the effect of empty space in Zen paintings. I had always dismissed these as rather abstract intellectual descriptions (as many of them are, I think), but perhaps there is something to them after all.

2 Chickens by Jakuchu - in the Hosomi Collection

The other point worthy of note is the level of skill necessary to make images of this sort. It both is and isn't difficult. Many zenga, for example, which are exemplary of the simplicity of this type, are less than fully satisfying as works of art. Their often praised spontaneity is common-place to many professional artists, and what is remarkable is that these works were regarded as sufficiently important to be preserved and treasured. In fact, in many cases, they were popular among foreign collectors before they were recognized here.

Jakuchu and Bada Shanren were different and display a high level of technical skill (especially in Jakuchu's case), and much of this is technical control of the medium, involving the ability to elicit depth from the ink line which it is almost too easy to produce a superficially dramatic effect, owing simply to the fluidity with which the ink flows off the brush, and the contrast it produces on white paper. Indeed, it can be so easy, that to produce depth and meaning for oneself is more difficult than creating a memorable or pleasing image for the viewer.