Episode 53: Painting Edo, Post-Pandemic

So I think we can all agree that we’re experiencing a spring like no other.  It isn’t just that the azaleas are blooming, that the butterflies are flitting between them, that the freak snowstorm that we got in late April has melted away.  And it isn’t just that the pandemic has receded, at least where I live, and we can all breathe deeply without a mask and see one another’s smiles.  It’s a conflation of it all.  It feels like the light is flooding in.  The air smells full and fragrant and everything just feels…open.

Well, almost everything.  Because “Painting Edo,” the largest exhibition ever displayed by the Harvard Art Museums, permanently closed on June 6th, before it ever got a chance to reopen.  And so, you have to think that no one, at least from a niche art historical perspective, is experiencing this unbearable lightness of post-pandemic being with more ambivalence than Dr. Rachel Saunders, the museum’s curator of Asian art.  I mean, put yourself in her shoes.  Except it’s not June of 2021, but February of 2020.  You’re about to open the doors to an exhibition that tells the story, in all its incalculable aesthetic richness, of the art of Edo-period Japan, which lasted from around 1600 to 1868, and is brilliantly represented by the more than 120 objects that each speak to a different part of this incredibly diverse cultural moment.  And then, a month after the opening, bam.  Covid.  The exhibition is shuttered.  Darkness descends in the galleries.  The thoughtful wall text sits unread.  The exquisite objects hang inertly, on display for no one. 

And if you know anything about the Edo period in Japan, which is named for the city of Edo, now present-day Tokyo, it’s tempting to get all clever and draw an obvious metaphor.  Edo, after all, was famously closed off from the West.  And this is what made Edo Edo.  It was its fervid inward gaze due to this relative seclusion and subsequent stability that allowed it to marinate so deeply in its own aesthetics.  This was a culture, in other words, that flourished in isolation.  So maybe, you conclude, there’s some poetry in that.  Maybe we can imagine these objects in conversation with one another, scrolls stretching their arms in greeting, basking in each other’s beauty, and if we were milling around the galleries, we’d only just get in the way.  Maybe this is the only way to for this exhibition to have its most authentic moment, you know, in the strangeness of ours.

But this metaphor, lyrical though it might be, is a vast oversimplification, one that barely does justice to the history of the period itself, let alone the blood, sweat, and tears of Saunders and her co-curator, Yukio Lippit.  In fact, it takes walking through this exhibition to realize just how important a multiplicity of voices and aesthetic styles were to Edo, how deftly its artists synthesized and experimented with the art of their history and the art from overseas, and how, inadvertent though it might be, it’s pretty Eurocentric to imagine that because Japan was largely closed to the West that it was isolated from the rest of the world.  We willfully forget that it was engaged in a potent cross-cultural conversation with its neighbors, and even with its own culture and history, which is itself teeming with influences, and instead imagine that it took the infamous Commodore Perry to swoop in and save it from itself.  That is, bring its aesthetics to the west, where, in France in particular, it made an enormous splash.  The truth is, Edo wasn’t sealed off so much as it was choosy.  It selected its diplomatic ties and trade with extreme care, limiting trade officially to the Dutch East India Company and, unofficially, with its longtime frenemy China.  And so, to determine what Edo aesthetics are most authentic is to allow for an amalgam of a wide range of Asian, Western, and especially Japanese culture, up and down Japan’s socioeconomic strata, up and down its religious spectrum, up and down the sea’s endless coastline.  There are, for example, the delicate, disposable woodblock prints of the floating world, the most famous of which, “The Great Wave of Kanagawa,” we covered extensively in episode 42.  There are the many ways of painting the natural world, from scientific exactness to abstract emotionalism.  There are moons and mountains and mist, in various seasons and styles.  Taken together, Japanese art from this period is a veritable buffet of medium and method, of elegance and irreverence, of home and away.  And this is what this episode is going to explore.  Maybe you weren’t given a chance to walk through these displays in the heartbreakingly short time the exhibition was open, but maybe, also, an exhibition, or a country, doesn’t have to be in front of you, or even, at first blush, open to you, to share with you its exquisite and complex song of itself.  Or, in other words, what actually makes Edo Edo.

But before we arrive at the doors of this exhibition, we need to pregame with a lightning quick overview of Japanese art until the 17th century, of how we arrived at this moment.  There’s obviously no way we could do justice to the thousands of years of aesthetic development in a few minutes, so let’s instead look at some larger ideas and how they shaped what we see.  Keep three in particular in mind: first, the role and evolution of Buddhism, second, the influence of Japan’s neighbors, especially China, and, third, as we’ve mentioned, the periods of relative isolation, of which Edo was only the most recent, especially as they followed closely on the heels of invasion.  These ideas are actually pretty inextricable from one another.  Take the role of Buddhism, for example.  Buddhism was crucial in shaping Japanese aesthetics, and, more broadly, the aesthetics of Indian and Chinese art as well, as the religion swept the subcontinent and continent before jumping to the Japanese archipelago in the 6th century.  And it’s early on in this exchange that the relationship between Chinese and Japanese art in particular becomes apparent, most notably in the way that they seem stylistically opposed and yet are still politically and culturally interdependent, and I’ll explain what this means.  You might notice that Chinese and Japanese art are strikingly opposite.  Chinese art is more commonly associated with serious-minded connoisseurship, with fine, luxurious wares – picture, for example, the brilliant, lustrous porcelain finish on a priceless Ming vase.  Japanese art, meanwhile, tended to embrace a more rustic asymmetry and sense of playfulness and irreverence; it’s less art of aspiration and perfection than of the human scale, of our human flaws. 

And we can see this juxtaposition play out in the Japanese tea ceremony, which is, on its face, purely Japanese.  The tea ceremony was an artistic and cultural manifestation of Zen Buddhism, which arose in the Muromachi period of the 15th century, and a teacup that would be used in the ceremony might be fired to appear unfinished, rustic and misshapen, yet sits perfectly in our imperfect hands, with a dent right where our thumb would naturally go.  Very Japanese.  But with this juxtaposition comes a fascinating interdependence.  Tea itself is Chinese in origin, brought to Japan from the Tang dynasty in 805 CE, and the rustic Japanese tea ceremony often valued highly-finished Chinese utensils as status symbols.  In other words, it’s not a surprise that, as with every culture everywhere, aesthetics are shaped by politics and class stratification, by what’s both culturally meaningful and culturally trendy.  And this integration of opposites, this eye towards what was beyond its borders as Japan synthesized with what already ran deep in the culture, is a thread running through Japanese art.  Like we see in the work of the Kano school in the Momoyama period, where cultivated Chinese influence was clearly present in more informal Japanese painting, until finally, in 1603, we arrive at Edo, with an aesthetic tradition shaped by Buddhism and by Japan’s neighbors, where a closed border and trade policy encouraged Japan to look inward, with art that is enormously supple, visually diverse, and ripe for evolution.

Okay, so we’re back at the doors of the exhibition.  And the first object we see is actually going to shape our entire experience – remember, in almost any exhibition, to mentally thank a curator for their service.  Because we see a painting from 1817, near the end of Edo, called “Grasses and Moon” by Tani Buncho.  It’s a large silk scroll, measuring at 170 centimeters wide, which is actually a pretty unusual orientation, meant to be unfurled horizontally instead of hung vertically.  The imagery seems straightforward: it’s a full moon on the left-hand side, sitting in a misty sky above a low horizon line, illuminating a cluster of river rushes in the foreground.  It’s gentle, simple, and stunning.  The rushes create a sense of recession based on the layered darkness of the ink wash, along with the hazy background, which open up to the brightness of the moon, which is itself the negative space of the unpainted silk.  But besides its overall, calming loveliness, there’s a crucial idea that makes this artwork so formative for the experience we’re about to have when we walk through these exhibition doors: what Yukio Lippit describes as “a pervasive feeling of ‘thereness.’”

What does “thereness” mean?  It can mean any number of things, including things that contradict each other, because with respect to Edo, this period of interdependent juxtapositions, it’s representative of an idea that is both deeply Buddhist and deeply modern.  We can, for example, think of “thereness” in terms of Buddhism, of meditative centering, a sense of being present in the moment as a means of recognizing your brief, impermanent, immediate presence in a much larger universe.  That gently urgent Buddhist moment of enlightenment.  When we look at “Grasses and Moon,” there are elements in the painting that make us feel as though we are actually there, that we can fully exist in this brief moment, like we can take literal steps into the grass and look up at the moon.  Like you could walk in or out of this painting without even noticing you’d left your own space.  Nothing feels staged or unnatural; the frame has disappeared, the ages have collapsed, and this artwork is a portal into a moment that might always simply exist.  And again, you can think about being there so effortlessly like tapping into a quiet meditative headspace, an idea of pure presence as old as Buddhism itself.  But, the thing is,it’s also incredibly modern for art to strip away its own frame and allow you to do this. 

Because the feeling of presence, of a manufactured world that feels indistinguishable from our own reality, is what modern art is all about, specifically in the West in the later half of the 19th century.  “Grasses and Moon” actually invites you into the scene with compositional elements borrowed from Western art: its low horizon line, its high-contrast monochromatic modeling, its one-point perspective, and its incredibly naturalistic subject matter – All elements that Saunders describes as “in the water of the period”, which Japanese painters could choose to deploy or not, depending on the end goal of the painting, and all of which allow for the emotional and subjective presence that are so decidedly eastern.  And it’s a bit of a mind twist, because we’re used to thinking about modernism from a western perspective; we don’t usually think about these modernist elements of painting so easily traversing the world.  Take a Western example: in episode 11, we looked at John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit.  Sargent similarly paints a scene that is unstaged, that you could walk right into, where the girls react to you exactly as they would in real life – an wide-open sunshiny five-year-old, a moody, closed-off adolescent.  You could easily describe a similar sense of “thereness.”  And it’s not such a stretch to imagine that modern Western painters, even inadvertently, wanted to capture their moment of life being lived as a means of tapping into something larger than that moment, like Buddhism does.  And so it’s not such a stretch to draw this parallel between a Japanese scroll from 1817 and a western portrait from 1886, or to emphasize the excitement for Japanese prints when they arrived in France in the late 19th century, or to say that there’s a Buddhist quality to the writing of Charles Baudelaire and his seminal text on modernity, “The Painter of Modern Life.”  The real skill of the modern painter, he writes, is his ability to create a world that “distills the eternal from the transitory.”  Very Japanese.

And you can take this framing device all the way through the exhibition with you, this Buddhist sense of ‘thereness’ and how it helps us understand why Edo expressed its modernity so well.  We can think of both thereness and modernity purely technical terms: take, for example, how the development of modern technological devices, like the microscope, furthered scientific inquiry and aesthetic exactness.  Like We see this in Maruyama Okyo’s “Peacock and Peonies” from 1768.  The visual intricacy is breathtaking: you can see every barb of the peacock’s feather, every neck muscle as it turns its head.  The naked eye would never be able to see each element of the natural world in this kind of detail.  Peacocks, it should be said, weren’t native to Japan and were imported during Edo, along with this fascination for scientific accuracy, and a host of European books on natural sciences.  And so this image, too, creates a sense of thereness based purely on its exactness.  This is the peacock you would actually see if you were there, thanks to modern scientific development.

But I think it’s even more interesting, for our purposes, to consider a less technical, more human kind of thereness, that is, the “thereness” that is created by art that observes and captures people in the process of living their human, imperfect lives, the kinds of observations that never made it into art until modernism.  Rendering someone in his or her moments of informality, when the pose is released and the hair is let down, is also intensely modern, intensely of a moment.  Take Degas and his dancers backstage in “The Rehearsal Onstage” from 1874: they’re decidedly not performing, certainly not idealized, but flat-footed and yawning.  He authentically captures a moment that is destined to pass, as all our yawns do.  These authentic moments between poses are what we see as well in Gion Seitoku’s “Woman Applying Makeup” from the early 19th century.  It’s an example of a ukiyo-e painting, a picture of a courtesan who would have occupied the pleasure-filled, floating world district of Edo.  In the same way that Degas was there onstage, mingling with the dancers, Seitoku was the proprietor of a brothel and was afforded intimate informal access to these women.  And from the outside, and according to art, we expect these women to look a certain way: fully-costumed, white faced, pink lipped, with thin, painted-on eyebrows and a coquettish stare.  But this woman is herself backstage, unidealized and incredibly human.  Her thick eyebrows are tented as she applies layers of safflower red dye to her red upper lip and green lower lip – the dye was known to appear green after one too many layers.  To capture a figure we think of as a beautiful, untouchable archetype as a human being with all of her flaws, her pink cheeks showing through the white foundation, screwing up the application of her make-up, is, again, a level of realism, of thereness in the moment, and of authenticity that is as modern as can be.

And, finally, consider the loose watercolor brushstrokes of a Lotus Pond.  Painted by Okutani Shuseki in the Meiji period that followed Edo, these simple, watery blossoms bring us full circle back to a simplicity that can’t help but center us in a moment, that feels meditative.  This image, especially when compared to the peacock, feels enormously simple.  Whole recessed fields are implied with a few gentle pecks of a paintbrush.  Backgrounds are almost entirely empty, bringing our focus to the magnified blooms in the foreground.  The ink itself darkens almost imperceptibly as it bleeds from one petal to the next, pulled by pooling water.  Staring at these blossoms are as calming as watching the colors of a Rothko gently dissolve from one block to the next, an experience he himself described as meditative.  This painting of a lotus pond is among the most contemporary in the collection, painted the closest to our lifetimes, and, incredibly, and much like how the invention of the camera in the West freed the brushstroke away from exactness, what makes this pond modern is how abstract it is, how liberated it is from the thing it represents in order to make us feel as though we are there, in the watery, fragrant fullness of this moment.

And it brings us back to ours.  Imagine that we’ve walked the exhibition and ended up where we began, in front of Grasses and Moon, reading the translation of the inscription in the upper right-hand corner: “On a beautiful night in mid-August, 1817, as I wandered the banks of the Sumida River, a clear moon shone as brilliantly as the sun, and the scene is rendered in this true view.”  A true view, co-curator Yukio Lippit reminds us, is, in effect, the “thereness” itself.  It’s the artist sharing with us not just what a moment looked like, but what it felt like, viscerally, emotionally, so that we, too, can experience it.  We see how clear the moon is, how brightly it shone in the warm mid-August night.  It’s the same moon we see on clear summer nights.  And the moon itself plays a host of metaphorical roles in both Chinese and Japanese art, especially with respect to its Buddhist emphasis on impermanence and meditative stillness.  Remember the Song Dynasty Bodhisattva that we looked at in episode 19, how there was nothing more calming than its quiet focus on the stillness of a moon’s reflection in a pool.  But it’s also important because of its communal nature, because we all share it.  In pre-modern Japan, especially, the moon designated social gatherings and rituals, and therefore showed up in the art for specific shared events, on scrolls unrolled for a celebratory day, for remembrances, for seasonal holidays.  And, as such, Lippit writes, the moon acts as “a universal symbol of connectivity.”  It serves, he continues, “as a time-honored motif for friendship and longing…no matter how distantly one is separated from friends and loved ones, we can all look up at the night sky and gaze upon the same moon.”

And I think, just maybe, this is where the real poetry lies.  We don’t have to search Edo for the perfect metaphor for the pandemic.  We don’t need a metaphor at all.  The moonlight is real.  Because for one brief, endless, terrible, anxious, poignant year, we were all kept physically apart from one another, from the people we loved, as communal spaces and international borders and art museums were closed.  But we were also connected, by this shared global trauma, and by the moon itself.  I could look up at the moon each night and know that it was same one that my father saw in Jerusalem, that my mother and sister saw in Toronto, that my brother saw in Western Massachusetts, that my toddler, whom they haven’t seen since he was an infant, stared at through the frosted glass of his nursery window.  This true view sustained us as the time passed, as we all got a little older, the way imperfect humans do, apart from one another, and aware of impermanence of our moment, for better and for worse, until, soon, I hope, we can finally be there, together, once again. 

And I hope we take this with us as we move forward, once the shock of openness has worn off and recedes into the normalcy we all so deeply craved.  I hope, as we all come back together and then, naturally, splinter off back into our own lives, that we remember to take a minute every now and then to center ourselves and look up at the moon that we shared, and that we still share, with each other, and with the past.  Maybe Edo is not a lesson in what happens when something closes.  Everything will eventually.  Maybe, instead, it’s about the potential, and the poetry, of the inevitable open that follows.