Americans tend to like lacquer more than they respect it. Conceptually, there is a fairly rigid wall of demarcation between art and craft, between canvas, marble, and bronze on the one hand and paper, wood, and everything else on the other. The latter may be pleasant, but the former is sublime. It is, for us, the big leagues, the highest reach of man’s aspiring.

Such thoughtless and anesthetized notions should be left at the door as you enter Japan Society, where a new exhibition, “The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin,” opens today. Shibata Zeshin (1807–91) was a first-rate painter (as this exhibition shows in numerous screen paintings) no less than he was, in all likelihood, the finest lacquerer of all time. The word “genius” in the exhibition’s title is for once fully appropriate. It is nearly inconceivable that anyone could achieve greater mastery of any art than Zeshin demonstrated in the lacquer works now on view. At the same time, however, he transcended mere craftsmanship. The tact and imagination he displayed in choosing his willows and waterwheels, his rice-laden boats, and his camellia sprays rival the most skillful compositions of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, his Western contemporaries. At the same time, in his depiction of bamboo shoots, dragonflies, and cowrie shells, he exhibits a realism that recalls the scientific drawings of such 16th-century masters as Jacopo Ligozzi and Joris Hoefnagel.

The current exhibition, which began in San Antonio and moved to Minneapolis before coming to New York, has been sensitively installed by the society’s new gallery director, Joe Earle. In its two earlier venues, the show, in its entirety, consisted of 54 works from the collection of the San Antonio-based Catherine and Thomas Edson. At Japan Society, however, it has been enhanced with 20 additional works, making this the largest showing of Zeshin ever mounted in America, and the biggest to be mounted anywhere since a commemorative exhibition in Tokyo in December 1907.

During the course of his long life, Zeshin, a native of Edo (later renamed Tokyo), bore witness to a revolution in his native Japan. His career, which began during the Shogunate, was fundamentally rerouted by the emergence of the Meiji Dynasty in 1868. Before that revolution, Japan was dominated, both spiritually and politically, by a feudal warrior class. Afterwards, with the opening of Japanese society to the West, Japanese culture as a whole became more centered in its cities than in its countrysides. The art that Zeshin produced in consequence of that change reflected this new spirit of sophisticated urbanity, called iki, which is sometimes translated as “chic” or “cool.” At the same time, sumptuary laws were passed, sharply limiting the use of gold, which had long seemed essential to the lacquerer’s art.

Even before the new laws, however, Zeshin was introducing techniques that enabled lacquer, a hard resin derived from trees native to China and Japan, to imitate everything from rusting iron and patinated bronze to rosewood and enameled porcelain. Among other tricks, he devised a way of smoothly applying the lacquer and then whipping it about with the teeth of a comb in such a way as to suggest a storm at sea.

As seen in the 77 works at Japan Society, Zeshin is a man no more susceptible to easy generalization than such equally long-lived artists as Picasso and Titian. By turns he can be almost coarsely comical or ravishing in his refinement. He can swerve from the boldest, most curvaceous asymmetries to a geometric calm that rivals the Neoplasticism of Mondrian.

Some of his works seem little short of miracles. Consider “Panel with Vegetable Design,” from 1888. This masterpiece of lacquered wood is interesting not least because its shape suggests the influence of Western painting. In this, it contradicts a general impression that the profound effect of Japanese art on the likes of Manet and Van Gogh was not reciprocated in the other direction. It is said that the use of vegetables in this panel suggests the passage of the Buddha into nirvana, with the giant radish in the center representing the Awakened One himself. However that might be, the silvery and golden tones of the gourds and roughage on view appear, despite their punctilious naturalism, to be transfigured and infused by a supernatural shimmer of divinity.

In such works by Zeshin, so exceptional and yet so emblematic of Japan, it is also possible to find artistic convictions that persist in Japanese visual culture today, although in very different form. In purely aesthetic terms, quite aside from the objects depicted, there is an almost adorable hunger for precision and perfection, a need to hunt down the rich rewards of littleness and charm, that persists into the works of Takashi Murakami and the creators of anime and manga cartoons, as well as in those namagashi bean-pastries that are one of the defining glories of Japanese confectionery.

Until June 15 (333 E. 47th St., between First and Second avenues, 212-832-1155).