The Arts of Hon’ami Kōetsu: Japanese Renaissance Master

Hardcover
196 pages, 10 x 11 ½ in.
142 color + 45 b/w illus., two 8-page gatefolds
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000
ISBN 9780876331385

This exhibition catalogue gives American audiences the rare opportunity to see outstanding examples of the work of the celebrated early seventeeth-century Japanese artist Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637). Nearly one hundred objects ranging from calligraphy, handscrolls, and printed books to ceramic teabowls, and lacquerwork are presented from collections throughout Japan, Europe, and the United States in this first-ever comprehensive survey of the artist’s work outside Japan. The centerpiece is the newest addition to the museum’s collections of East Asian art, a spectacular twenty-seven-foot longscroll decorated with gold and silver woodblock designs of ivy, grasses, and wisteria, and brushed with classical Japanese love poems in Kōetsu’s calligraphy. This multitalented genius inspired his contemporaries and exerted profound influence on generations to come by revolutionizing the visual effects of classical poetry scrolls, working with the artist Tawaraya Sotatsu to produce striking designs, over which he wrote his distinctively bold calligraphy. Kōetsu’s interest in calligraphy led him to design beautiful lacquer boxes to hold the essential tools of East Asian writing: brush and inkstone. One such lacquer box, with a characteristically bold motif of a single deer on a striking gold and black background, in the collection of the museum, is featured. Essays in the catalogue include “Waka and the Kyoto Renaissance of Classical Poetry,” “The Advent of Movable-Type Printing,” “Handscrolls: The Flowering of Artistic Collaboration,” “The Kōetsu Style in Lacquerware,” “Kōetsu at Takagamine,” and “Kōetsuand the History of Tea Culture.”

Felice Fischer is the Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art and acting curator of East Asian art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.