Kyoto’s Gracious Fusion: Beauty and Technique Intersect

Tokyo had the brains, but Kyoto had the brush. So it was said of the mild rivalry in Japan’s turn-of-the-century art scene. Tokyo had a reputation for art rich in ideas and historical reference, but Kyoto painters had the edge in technique.

A gorgeous new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art featuring Kyoto artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries certainly affirms that the city regarded as Japan’s center for traditional arts could turn out talent. Beauty is the operative term here, and its variants--refinement, grace, elegance--abound.

But beneath the serene surfaces of these scrolls and screens, another story is told, one of tumult, tension and dissent. Battles were taking place for the soul of Japan during those years, and though the paintings in this show are far from war reportage, they were, in their own calmly seductive way, partisans in the struggle to define the nation’s true course.

“Modern Masters of Kyoto: Nihonga From the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection” spans about 70 years of Japanese history, from the beginning of the Meiji era to the early years of the Showa period, through evolving, competing concepts of nationhood.

The Meiji restoration in 1868, which brought the imperial family back to power, ended centuries of isolation for Japan, which suddenly found itself confronted with the twin challenges of modernization and westernization. Japan had already integrated significant cultural influences from abroad--China especially--but its self-image was closer to that of a pure, clear broth than an American-style melting-pot stew. How, then, to incorporate the new and imported while maintaining the integrity of the nation’s traditions, especially when those traditions were fundamental to its identity?

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As Japanese goods began to appear in Western markets, exported Japanese art seized the imaginations of artists in Europe and the U.S., launching a craze called Japanolatry, Japomania and, most enduringly, Japonisme. Japanese motifs, the striking asymmetries of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) and the expressive beauty of calligraphic line, permeated a wide swath of artistic activity outside the small island nation, from the paintings of Van Gogh to the architecture and design of both British and American arts and crafts movements.

What was flowing in from the West, when these riches were flowing out? Western-style art education, for one: methods of drawing using perspective and shading that clashed with traditional teachings.

Many artists embraced the additions to the repertory, and oil painting emerged as a viable alternative to brush and ink. Still others resisted, and it was the friction of old against new, native against foreign, that gave rise to nihonga. Defined literally as Japanese painting, the term nihonga was coined in the 1880s to describe painting using traditional Japanese methods and themes, according to a national rather than a foreign aesthetic.

Nihonga, as this show and its luscious, detailed catalog demonstrate, did not conform to a single uniform style but were diverse in approach and subject matter.

Despite its emphasis on native tradition, the influence of calligraphically driven painting derived from Chinese tradition, as well as the bolder tonalities and larger scale of European painting, can be detected among the 30 works on view in this half of the exhibition, which was divided into two parts because of space limitations at the museum’s Pavilion for Japanese Art. (The second half, which covers the same chronological territory, runs June 8 through Aug. 1.)

Primarily landscapes with seasonal themes or everyday scenes--fishermen unloading baskets from their boat or shellfish gatherers at the shore--the paintings rely more on direct observation from nature than on the styles and approaches established by artists of preceding generations.

The importance of artistic lineage begins to break down in the period covered by the show, which was organized by the Seattle Art Museum. Fidelity to the style of the master teacher begins to be augmented, and at times supplanted, by an insistent individualism.

Tsuji Kako (1870-1931) is the best example of this phenomenon, and his paintings of stunning simplicity are the brightest highlights of the show. In the tall hanging scroll “Hazy Moon Through the Pine” (circa 1913-14), Kako propels the eye up the height of the painting along the path of an increasingly dense, deep gray tree trunk, then frees it to meander down again among porous clusters of pine needles, which frame a rounded void of blank silk doubling as the luminous moon.

His “Green Waves” (circa 1910), a four-panel screen, is all tonality and shimmer, a spectacular vision of dappled light on water, distilled to little more than a horizon line and painted in a reduced palette of sea foam green, blue-gray and gold.

Kako knew he was out on a limb with paintings like these, which redefined a subject rather than merely refining the established traditions of representing it. He hoped, he said in 1913, to continue the determination to make paintings deemed “eccentric and strange.”

His student, Tomita Keisen, tweaked the whole tradition of master-disciple continuity by vowing to carry on his teacher’s nonconformity. His paintings, like many in the show, possess a special verve, the intensity of the threshold, the tenuous boundary between upholding tradition and reinvigorating it.

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* “Modern Masters of Kyoto: Nihonga From the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pavilion for Japanese Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through June 6. The second part of the exhibition runs June 8 through Aug. 1.