Episode 53: Painting Edo, Post-Pandemic
“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.”
In February of 2020, I was given the opportunity by the New York Review of Books to stroll the galleries of Harvard Art Museums’ “Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection” and write an exhibition review. “Painting Edo” was the largest and, truth be told, most exquisite exhibition the museum had ever mounted, which made it all the more tragic when it shuttered due to Covid a month later, and never had the chance to reopen.
Most of us haven’t been thoroughly educated in Japanese art – my university’s art history department didn’t even have a professor of Asian art on staff when I was a student there – and so we tend to see it though its history, or its “foreignness,” or simply through the eyes of how it informed Western art. In other words, we rarely feel like we have the knowledge necessary to see it on its own terms, and how it offers the same glimpse into artists bearing witness to and escaping from their current moment the way that all art does.
And this is what “Painting Edo” did so well: it approached Edo period art (c. 1603-1867) with as much authenticity as it could, uniquely on its own terms, which, incredibly enough, made this art from across the world and from centuries ago feel even more present, applicable, and modern.
This episode was produced in partnership with the Harvard Art Museums.
Images Referenced:
Music Used:
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Noe Noe,” “A Certain Lightness,” “Algea Trio,” “Kilkerrin,” “Gullwing Sailor,” “Two Dollar Token,” “Silent Flock”
Billie Holiday, “Blue Moon”
