Life Embedded Within the Page

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The New York Sun

In the spring of 1767, the Japanese artist Ito Jakuchu and the poet Daiten Kenjo, heading for Osaka, set out just before dawn on a daylong boat trip down the Yodo River. “As the scenery moved by,” Daiten wrote, “Jakuchu made sketches and I composed short poems. We did not care to complete our impressions. We worked on the spur of the moment, improvising by sheer inspiration.” That day, Jakuchu made 15 drawings of the river, its distant mountains, people, trees, and boats. Daiten wrote 22 short poems, such as one that reads: “Mountains colored high and low, pale mist far off; people’s dwellings here and there, kitchen smoke nearby.”The result of their journey was “Aboard the Ship of Inspiration” (1767), an astonishing 28-footlong, black-white-and-gray panoramic scroll. The collaborative woodblock print has never been publicly displayed until now, and it is the centerpiece of the New York Public Library’s “Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan,” an exquisite exhibition of approximately 250 works of “ehon,” or Japanese “picture books,” from the library’s collections.

A masterful and organic union of image and word, “Aboard the Ship of Inspiration” is printed in reverse. The daytime sky is velvety black, and the short poems, printed in white and beautifully paced along the wavering sky, like bright white moons illuminate the blackness, moving your eyes into the scenery to search for the forms of poetic inspiration. Trees, houses, mountains, and shoreline are delineated with blunt white contours; and the speckled fields of water, mountains, and landscape, drifting like fog, shift through varying densities of gray.

“Aboard the Ship of Inspiration” is discreet and spare; a free-floating distillation that gets at essences through shorthand images and evocative text. It flows as naturally as a river, and it encourages contemplation and meditation or daydreaming and free association.The scroll, which is delicate in approach yet forceful in feeling, may have been the inspiration for the exhibition, which, also impeccably paced, is understated, airy, and organic yet full of passion.

Curated by Roger S. Keys, a visiting scholar in East Asian Studies at Brown University, “Ehon” comprises works from 764 to the present, and it is the largest show of Japanese book art ever organized. Arranged thematically in four sections — “Origins,” “The Art of the Book,” “Heaven,” “Earth,” and “Humanity” — the exhibition, Japanese in temperament, is organic in both its flow and its structure.There is nothing stuffy or “bookish” about this spectacular show; even the least interesting works on view (contemporary books by On Kawara, Yoko Ono, Vija Celmins, and Murakami Takashi) feel like wayward voices within a rich and vibrant tradition.

Mr. Keys is a scholar with wit and an eye. He presents us with the history of the Japanese livre d’artiste, from its origins in Buddhist sutras, including the oldest surviving printed book, “The Sutra of the Great Incantations of Undefiled Pure Light” (764–70), to Ukiyoe masterpieces by Moronobu, Kunisada, Utamaro, and Hokusai, on up to “manga,” or Japanese comics, of the present day, but he gives us so much more.

The low-lit show — combining elements of hard and soft, body and nature — is enlivened with complementary banners and backdrops of bloodred and a light, mossy green. Paying attention to texture, energy, and color, as well as theme, Mr. Keys has not only generally chosen great works of art for “Ehon,” he has held onto the core characteristics of the Japanese aesthetic, even when it involves bringing in books by non-Japanese-born artists. Mr. Keys has brought together books of differing format and period — works that might initially seem to be strange bedfellows — and, through their juxtapositions, expanded our understanding of his subject in its myriad cultural aspects.

Modernist masterpieces such as Onchi Koshiro’s “Sensations of Flying” (1934), Kaburagi Kiyokata’s “The Whirlpool” (1913-14), and Kamisaka Sekka’ “Flowers of a Hundred Worlds” (1910) relate in temperament to 16thcentury “White-Drawing Handscrolls of ‘The Tale of Genji,'” Hiroshige’s views of the Tokaido Road (1832), Hokusai’s views of Mt. Fuji (1834), Utamaro’s “Gifts of the Ebb Tide” (1789), and a 14th-century anonymous artist’s rendition of “Michimori,” a stunning work, depicting, among other things, a full moon, a hillside, and butterfly antennae in textured mica and black ink on blue paper.

The exhibition drives home the fact that Modernism and Minimalism, which came to the West in part through Ukiyo-e-inspired Art Nouveau — and which embrace spare materials and get at the pared-down essences of form — are born out of Japanese discretion and restraint, as well as out of a Japanese approach to nature. It also makes clear that calligraphy, a full-frontal force against the plane, is a living energy made up of verbs not nouns; and is the impetus, in part, for abstraction and specifically for Abstract Expressionism.

Walking through “Ehon,” I was aware of forces, rather than of things. The group of dancers in Tori Kiyonaga’s “Geisha Performing a Lion Dance” writhes like a pyramid of flames that, many-legged, moves as one wild beast.The excitement over an ordered, rhythmic mass in motion must have also inspired Tokosai, whose illustration “A Marching Band of Russian Sailors” (1853) is included in the exhibition, under a section called “Caucasians in Japan.” The musicians are clearly marching in step, yet their feet appear to be rat-a-tat-tatting on the ground like sticks against a drum, and they push and pull against one another as if together they were a slide trombone.

“Ehon” gives us motion in things; things in motion. It is an exhibition not of books but of the life embedded within the page.

October 20 through February 4 (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, 212-704-8642).


The New York Sun

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