The Shoguns’ Secrets

In 1615, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Japanese shogun, or military feudal overlord, defeated his remaining rivals to emerge as unchallenged ruler of Japan, bringing on 2 1/2 centuries of unprecedented peace and prosperity under army rule.

The calm and the riches during the reign of 15 successive Tokugawa shoguns fostered an incredible outburst of art--on screens and scrolls and kimonos and textiles and porcelain and lacquer and helmets and woodblocks--in an era that is known as the Edo period in Japan.

Although the Japanese art that is most familiar in the United States, like samurai armor or Katsushika Hokusai’s color woodblock print “Great Wave,” dates from the Edo period, most of the work of that period is usually out of American sight, kept in Japanese collections and rarely loaned.

Americans now have an extraordinary chance to see some of the finest works of Edo in the stunning exhibition “Edo: Art in Japan 1615-1868” that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington last Sunday and continues through Feb. 15. The show will not travel.

“This is the largest show of Japanese art in this decade anywhere in the world, including Japan,” said Robert T. Singer, curator of Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the guest curator of the Washington exhibition.

Singer, who worked in Japan for 14 years as a research fellow at Kyoto University and as a teacher of Japanese art history before joining LACMA in 1988, spent four years cajoling and begging for the 300 pieces in the show, including 47 that are classified by the Japanese government either as official “national treasures” or as important and fragile enough to require government permission to travel outside Japan.

“I asked for all the great things that I’ve seen in 25 years,” he said in a recent interview in the exhibition galleries. “I called in all my chits. I think I got 98% of everything I asked for. I got things I really didn’t expect.”

Visitors, however, will only see half of what Singer garnered, unless they come to the gallery more than once. The Japanese have set six weeks as the limit that almost all their pieces can remain on exhibition in Washington. The Japanese are so concerned about the sensitivity of the pieces to light, Singer said, that “they only bring them out for a few days every year in Japan.”

Gallery workers will start removing pieces and substituting similar ones in early January. The exhibition will be almost completely different by Jan. 12. That may cause some confusion. A visitor this week may be puzzled by the failure to find the 17th century Hikone screen featured on the cover of Singer’s massive catalog. The screen, which has never before left Japan, will not emerge in the exhibition until January.

“It’s like having two exhibitions in one,” said Singer. “It’s great for curators.”

*

The Edo period takes its name from the town of Edo, which served as the military headquarters for the shoguns while figurehead emperors remained in the imperial capital of Kyoto. The shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu had expelled the Christian missionaries, and his successors tried to keep Japan isolated from the rest of the world. This shut out most Western influence at a time of growth and exuberance. Encouraged by an emerging, wealthy merchant class that wanted, and could pay for, stylish objects for beauty and prestige, the arts flourished throughout Japan.

In a time of rapid urbanization, the population of Edo soared, reaching more than a million in 1720, probably making it the largest city in the world. Although other Japanese cities also prospered and produced a bounty of art, the city of Edo dominated and stamped its name on the era. The authority of the shogun weakened in the mid-19th century, partly because the shogun of the time accepted American demands to open up Japanese trade. The power of the emperor was restored in 1868, and the imperial court moved to Edo and changed the city’s name to Tokyo or “eastern capital.”

Organizing the exhibition posed problems for Singer because of the extent and variety of the Edo period. “It’s like doing a show in Western art from the Renaissance to the modern age,” he said.

Rather than separate the objects by art forms--putting porcelain, textiles and woodblock prints, for example, in different rooms, Singer decided to divide the exhibition by themes: ornament; samurai; work; religion and festivals; travel, landscape and nature; and entertainment.

“The Japanese do not separate fine art and decorative art,” said Singer. “That’s a Western idea. In Japan, there is no distinction.” The same artist might paint porcelain as well as a scroll, and Singer wanted both works in the same room.

Americans will find some of the most familiar woodblock prints in the entertainment rooms. The title “entertainment” is kind of a euphemism. “Pleasure” would be more apt, for most of the artwork comes out of the “pleasure quarters” that the shoguns licensed in every town as a safety valve in a highly regimented society. Samurai warriors and wealthy merchants consorted with courtesans in the bordellos of these quarters, while the poor flocked to the theater and crowded around street performers.

These districts were known as the “floating world,” and the idealized prints that described them were called ukiyoe, or “pictures of the floating world.” Edo sported Japan’s largest pleasure quarter, Yoshiwara, and the ukiyoe were published and sold mostly in Edo city.

The artists aimed their wares at the commoners who could not afford to visit the bordellos or hobnob with actors after performances. The prints were regarded as drivel for the poor, and merchants sometimes used them for wrapping when shipping porcelain to other lands.

But Western artists in Paris and elsewhere discovered them at the end of the 19th century and tried to copy their colors and exotic point of view. The enthusiasm in the West eventually enhanced their value in Japan.

The enthusiasm of Western artists is demonstrated vividly at the National Gallery of Art. The Edo show in the east wing of the museum features “Courtesan,” a color woodblock print made by Keisai Eisen in the 1820s of a prostitute in an elegant kimono and fancy headdress. That print was reproduced in a French magazine and copied by Vincent van Gogh in 1887 for his painting “The Courtesan,” which is on exhibit in the west wing of the museum in the show “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” (which moves to LACMA on Jan. 17).

The Edo show also displays two other prints used by Van Gogh in his work: “Sudden Shower Over Ohashi Bridge” and “Plum Garden at Kameido,” both from Ando Hiroshige’s 1856 series of prints called “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.”

The influences did not go one way. Despite the attempt of the shoguns to keep their people from foreign contact, some of the 19th century Edo work makes clear that the artists knew Western art. In the haunting silk scroll “Cherry Blossoms at Night,” painted in the 1850s, for example, Katsushika Oi, the daughter of the renowned ukiyoe artist Katsushika Hokusai, experiments with Western shadows, lighting and molding to show a beautiful, young woman writing a nocturnal poem.

*

If a visitor has time, there are rewards for looking closely at the massive screens in the exhibition that show a host of Japanese in a myriad of activity. In the two-panel paper screens of “Amusements Along the Riverside at Shijo,” painted in the late 1620s, for example, the vitality of the pleasure quarters of Kyoto is laid bare: female Kabuki dancers and musicians doubling as prostitutes, a dog jumping through a hoop in the hands of a man in an exotic hat, a juggler balancing a bowl on a stick held up by his chin, a keeper poking a caged porcupine to arouse its quills, jostling crowds trying to see it all, more sideshows, more pitchmen, more hawkers.

Each section of the exhibition has its own treasures and surprises. The samurai rooms, for example, feature a lineup of outlandish helmets. In the Edo period, the samurai, or warriors, were regarded as the highest class, followed by farmers, craftsmen and merchants. But it was an era of peace, and many samurai had become rich administrators and bureaucrats who could afford to order flamboyant armor that would be striking on parade but useless in war.

On exhibit now are helmets in the shape of a butterfly, an upside-down rice bowl, and a Buddhist temple tower. Before the show ends, there will be a helmet in the form of rabbit ears and one covered in boar’s hair.

The section on religion includes an icon of Zen Buddhism, “Circle, Triangle, Square,” drawn in ink on a paper scroll in the early 19th century by the monk Sengai Gibon. The scroll, which has nothing but an inked circle, triangle and square and the title in calligraphy, is “like a Rorschach test,” said Singer. Everyone interprets it in his or her own way.

Singer is most enthusiastic about a pair of paper screens, “Maple Trees in Spring and Autumn,” painted by Sakai Hoitsu in 1818. He discovered it in a private collection in Osaka. “It has never been displayed anywhere,” he said.

In brilliant greens and reds, Hoitsu paints an autumn landscape on one screen and a spring landscape on another that join together as if they were one grand landscape. When the six panels of each screen are folded slightly to stand, the grand landscape seems to undulate with the upward and downward curves of the hills. “I’m sure this will soon be declared a national treasure,” said Singer.

During the 12 weeks of the exhibition, the National Gallery of Art is mounting a festival of Japanese performing arts that first developed during the Edo period. The festival will feature marionettes, kites, dancers, taiko drummers, jugglers, sword tricksters, acrobats and Kabuki actors. Demonstrations of Japanese flower arranging are scheduled as well.

*

“Edo: Art in Japan 1615-1868” continues through Feb. 15. For information, call (202) 737-4215 or check the gallery’s Web site at https://www.nga.gov.