Kamisaka Sekka and Rimpa/Rinpa @ the Clark
Monday, May 28, 2012
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| Opening day for Kamisaka Sekka |
It shouldn’t happen, but it had been
twenty-seven months since I last visited the Clark Center for Japanese Art and
Culture, even though it is only a bare twenty-eight miles from my door. I was very aware of missing several
interesting exhibitions, and my only excuse is busyness. So earlier this month, I stole an afternoon I
didn’t really have, and went to see the opening of Kamisaka Sekka, 1866-1942: Tradition and Modernity (running through
July 28). In truth, the presentation
goes far beyond this one artist, and gives a history of the Rimpa School (琳派 Rimpa or Rinpa), of
which Kamisaka was its last great master.
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| Detail from Kusunoki Masashige before the Battle, Kamisaka Sekka (ca. 1918) |
I have long been intrigued by most
things Meiji. It astounds me that a
nation could—by an act of will—redefine itself so quickly. Japan leaped from 17th Century
feudalism to 20th Century modernity in barely half a century. It made an art of copying Europe and America
in major areas of life, and yet managed to accomplish its leap with most of its
national character intact. Compared to,
say, a similar effort in China under Mao Zedong, it was almost bloodless, and
so much smoother.
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| Kamisaka Sekka |
Kamisaka Sekka was three when forces
loyal to the teenaged Emperor Meiji put down the last vestiges of the Tokugawa
Shogunate. He had been born into a
samurai family near Kyoto, but a major plank in modernization was the abolition
of the Samurai class. Many former
samurai turned to the arts. Others
became foreign students, sent to the west to bring back modern thought and
technology. Kamisaka did both. After mastering Rimpa, he studied in Glasgow,
Scotland, and returned home to become the father of modern Japanese design.
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| From Blue Iris, Nakamura Hōchū (d. 1819) |
Kamisaka considered Rimpa to be Japan’s
only native school of art, with all other styles coming first from China. Rimpa originated early in the 17th
Century, and could appear as hanging paintings, folding screens, decorative fans,
lacquer ware, textiles, ceramics, woodblock, or books of prints. Kamisaka worked in each of these. Backgrounds often bore calligraphy and a distinctive
gold or silver sheen, against which objects appeared in strong colors, sometimes with bold
outlines and other times with no outline at all. Subject matter often came from
plants, flowers, or birds, but sometimes came from legends, the theater, or popular stories. Because the patrons who supported it were wealthy, Rimpa exudes a stylized lavishness. |
| Noh Scene: Hagoromo, Kamisaka Sekka (ca. 1920-1940) |
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| Moon and Waves, Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858) |
Pieces by several of the earlier masters
caught my attention. Suzuki Kiitsu’s
Moon and Waves achieves wild excitement with very simple colors and lines, with
a modern appearance in stark contrast to my image of Tokugawa feudalism.
I enjoyed Kamisaka’s more traditional work, with less of a European influence. He was sent with the assignment to discover what Europeans would like to see in Japanese art. He accomplished the task well, but Edwardian tastes are not my tastes.
I enjoyed Kamisaka’s more traditional work, with less of a European influence. He was sent with the assignment to discover what Europeans would like to see in Japanese art. He accomplished the task well, but Edwardian tastes are not my tastes.
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| Pages from “All Kinds of Things” (“Chigusa,”), Kamisaka Sekka (1903) |
A gentlemen saw me admiring Suzuki’s
Bush Clover and Pampas Grass and came to tell me he had enjoyed it for several
years, hanging in his bedroom. I asked
if he was Mr. Clark, and he corrected me, “Bill.” At that moment, we were interrupted by the
start of Dr. Marks’ talk, and we did not get to finish our conversation, but I
must point out that in three visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum, in
London, I have never yet been approached by either Victoria or Albert.
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| Detail from Bush Clover and Pampas Grass, Suzuki Kiitsu (1808-1841) |
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| Grasshopper detail from Autumn Grasses and Moon, Sakai Ōho (1808-1841) |
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| Seven Lucky Gods, Kamisaka Sekka (ca. 1920-1930) |
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| Morning Glories, Kamisaka Sekka (ca. 1920-1940) |
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| Takasago, Kamisaka Sekka (ca. 1920-1930) |
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| Hollyhocks, Sakai Ōho (1808-1841) |
I enjoy visiting the Clark Center. As a small museum, it has a special personality. After my previous visit—a samurai exhibit, I got too busy to post anything on this blog. Then, last summer I had the chance to see a similar presentation, in London. I came away impressed that the Clark had done a better job telling the samurai story than had the Victoria and Albert. The difference is, even if a visitor can devote most of one day to the Victoria and Albert, one still feels the pressure to race from item to item, running from antiquity to the present, and from continent to continent. There are thousands of things to see. Yet in the samurai room, the Victoria and Albert was outdone by the Clark. The Clark told a richer story, and gave visitors a more intimate setting.
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| Samurai at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, July 2011 |
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| Samurai at the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, January, 2010 |
I may get back for a second look at the
Rimpa before it closes, July 28th.
Then I look forward to a two-part presentation of landscapes, beginning
in September.
For more on the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture:
For my previous review of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture:
Today class, we consider the California Primary
Friday, May 25, 2012
A former student, recently relocated to California, wrote me
to ask for advice in our upcoming election.
Teachers live for the teachable moment, so even if this student last sat
in my class 17 years ago, I found this more exciting than any other aspect of
an election that doesn’t have much else to recommend it. Here is my answer:
Dear Sheryl,
Welcome to California.
I wish we could offer you a more interesting first election, but while
on a national level, this election offers lots of characters and plot, if not a
lot of solutions to our national problems, statewide it’s pretty dull. The more interesting election will come in
November, when Governor Brown asks for a tax increase to help close the budget
shortfalls.
At the top of the ticket, both parties have already settled
on candidates, so that our only choice is whether to endorse those choices, or
register a protest. I’m not sure how
much good that does. Remarkably, Democratic
primaries in four states have given President Obama less than 60% majorities,
even when there is no reputable candidate running against him. Yet no legitimate challenger has stepped
forward to do so. I remember the year
Lyndon Johnson dropped out of his re-election campaign because the second-place
candidate in New Hampshire finished close enough to embarrass him. Yet this year, Americans Elect has a place on
the ballot in over 30 states, and no candidate seems interested in pursuing it.
On the Republican side, Mit Romney will be the candidate,
and nothing California can do will change that.
Some people may complain about this, but I am much happier having
candidates vetted and winnowed in small states where voters actually get to
meet and go face-to-face with candidates.
California is a media state, where money talks, but few voters get a
personal look at the candidates. If
several candidates had survived until the California primary, our size would
seal the deal, but if we have no say here, we have other ways to throw our
weight around.
The question then becomes whether we want to use our vote to
send Romney some kind of message. If,
for example, I vote for Santorum in the primary (even though he’s already
dropped out), would that send a message to Romney that I would like him to pick
a social conservative like Huckabee for Vice President? I have no way of knowing, and it’s an iffy
proposition that has ten ways it might backfire. I’m still trying to decide.
The race for senator is even stranger. There are 24 candidates, of whom Diane
Feinstein will capture about 60% of the vote, and the other 23 will average
less than 2% apiece. The second place
finisher, who might come in with five or six percent, will be Feinstein’s
opponent in November. It could be one of
the 14 Republicans, or another one of the six Democrats, or even a Libertarian
or one of the two Peace and Freedom candidates.
(Correction: It was late at night when I wrote this. If Feinstein gets 60%, there won't be any run-off in November.) I won’t vote for Feinstein, but I don’t recognize the name of any
challenger. The truth is, in a media state,
running is so expensive that serious candidates (if the Republicans could actually
come up with one) looked at this race and decided it wasn’t worth it. In our last election, Meg Whitman and Carly
Fiorina threw immense amounts of personal wealth at races for governor and
senator, and came away empty.
For all intents and purposes, California has no statewide
Republican Party. They manage only a
feeble minority in the state legislature, and elect no statewide
officials. I blame this on Pete Wilson,
a governor we had in the 1990s. Because
he had no appeal to social conservatives in areas where their instincts are
best (such as Life), he had to demagogue the issues where their instincts are
worst (for example, xenophobia). As a
result, he convinced the Hispanic population (fast becoming the biggest voting
block in the state) that Republicans wished they would go somewhere else. I keep hoping for a Republican who can change
that image, but I don’t see one yet.
I don’t know who is running for Congress in your part of the
state. In my area, the Republican
incumbent, Devin Nunes, doesn’t impress me very much, but the Democrats had to
import a candidate from the Bay Area to offer any challenger at all. He has a nice biography, but had to move 250
miles to live in our district, and has no connections here. I hope your district offers a better choice.
The only real decisions on this ballot come with two
propositions:
Prop 28 tinkers with term limits for our state legislature,
shortening the total time a senator or assemblyman can serve in Sacramento, but
allowing them to serve it all in one house or the other. We keep experimenting with term limits, but
few people can argue that we’ve actually had better overall government since
the experiment started. It is harder to
decide how much term limits have been a positive or negative factor in the
increasing failure of government over the last decade. I am inclined to vote yes on 28, even if I
don’t expect it to produce any miracles.
Prop 29 creates a new tax on tobacco. Ordinarily, when I see R.J. Reynolds paying
big bucks to influence my vote, I would automatically vote against them. However, there are some unsettling aspects of
this tax. Both the pro and con campaigns
seem to be primarily financed by money from outside the state. It starts to look to me like national groups
like the American Cancer Society—ordinarily supported by donations and
corporate sponsors—would like to increase their financial base by raiding
Californians with a dedicated tax. We
opened the door to this a few years ago with a bond issue to support stem-cell
research. Now we’ll have a tax to
support cancer research. Is this really
a proper role for state governments at a time that we can’t pay the bills for
basic state services? Government does
not belong as a partner in every worthy effort.
Nor should every good effort be released from the need to justify
themselves on a regular basis to donors.
In November, I plan to vote for Governor Brown’s tax increases for the
general fund, and I certainly don’t consider myself a friend of Big Tobacco,
but I think I will vote “No,” on 29.
This has been fun. It
always brings out the teacher in me to be asked a good question. You get an “A” for paying attention in class.
Mr. Carroll
Entertaining Myself outside the US Embassy
Sunday, July 03, 2011
One nice thing about the hobbies of entomology and botany is that they can be indulged almost anywhere. These two weeks I have been traveling in Brazil. We’ve had many little adventures, but our big one was a road trip to the US embassy in Brasilia to register the citizenship of my youngest grandson. The three-hour drive is pretty, but we arrived late by approximately the same amount of time it takes to clean up after a car-sick three-year-old. Then, the embassy security personnel considered it excessive that the registration of one infant should require the admission of seven people, even if each of the siblings, parents, and grandparents carried US passports. My son—very good in a crisis—managed to negotiate for six, but the guards insisted that a line had to be drawn, and I found myself left outside as the rest of my family went in. Thus it was that I enjoyed about 90 minutes exploring the landscaped area in front of the US and French embassies and a patch of weeds that surrounded a construction site.
The city of Brasilia is younger than I am. It was not laid out until 1956, by which time I was in 1st grade. The idea was to encourage the development of Brazil’s interior by placing a new capital smack in the middle of undeveloped territory. Today, the metropolitan area boasts over three million people, but its recent agrarian past was evident in the Brachiaria that dominated all of the non-landscaped areas. This part of Brazil was largely settled by immigrants from Germany and Italy, but the Brachiaria came from Africa. Brought in as high-protein forage for cattle, it has pushed out the native flora.
As is often the case, the field of Brachiaria had also become home to several hills of leaf-cutter ants, probably Atta cephalotes. I found a column of these ants moving up and down a young mango tree, but they weren’t moving any cargo. I have seen them, overnight, strip the leaves from a bigger tree than this one, but perhaps these workers, like me, were simply out for a late-afternoon stroll while the rest of the family did something inside the embassy.
Several kinds of butterflies flitted about the Brachiaria. The sun was too low and the individuals too skittish for me to get many pictures, but one black and white skipper sat still while I manipulated my lens within about five inches. After several days of research I am convinced it is the Tropical Checkered Skipper, Pyrgus oileus (sometimes seen as P. orcus), on a Lilac Tasselflower, Emilia sonchifolia. The P. oileus caterpillar feeds on Malvaceae (like cotton or mallow), but the adult likes the nectar of Compositae, like this Emilia (an immigrant from either Africa or South East Asia).
Next I investigated a long wall heavily colonized by the Brown Widow Spider, Latrodectus geometricus. Each of the females rested under a little awning; so that I wasn’t sure what I had I dislodged one. The one male I saw rested out front in a web more condensed and full of trash than the Black Widows we have in California. The egg sac is also distinct, covered with little bumps. I captured one female to use later for studio portraits.
The landscaped areas in front of the embassy have several short palm trees. I gave each some careful inspection, in hopes of finding a jumping spider, but instead I found this wasp nest. It was now late enough that the wasps—possibly yellowjackets—were inside for the night. I was happy to leave them there. I photographed the nest from several angles, which prompted a visit from the embassy security guard, who reminded me politely that I was not to point my camera at the embassy itself.
I moved on to a tree that offered peeling bark and found my jumping spider. It was probably an immature Menemerus bivittatus, the Gray Wall Jumper, a pantropical species I have seen in several countries. Later, on a dead tree, I pulled back some bark and had an adult disappear into the grass before I could get a good look at her, but from a small nest I began to see hatchlings escaping. I suspect these were also M. bivittatus, and added a couple to my collection for later filming.
About this time my family reappeared, my grandson registered in time to celebrate his first 4th of July. However, before we left Brasilia, we took a drive through the downtown, including a pass around three sides of the congressional building (Palacio do Congress) and one corner of the presidential office (Palacio do Planalto), the supreme court, and the national cathedral. That’s the nice thing about having travel as a hobby, it can be indulged almost anywhere.Open-air Arthropodarium on a Charlotte Corday
Saturday, June 25, 2011
School is out, so it's catch-up time here at Capers. All the thoughts and observations that I've carried around since things accelerated in March can finally find a place to land.
In the few minutes I could snatch here or there over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been enjoying a hedge of passion vines and grapes that I started last summer. Over the winter, I covered (and saved) some of the passion vines with clear plastic, and learned a lesson from what I never got covered. A freeze came on suddenly just before Thanksgiving. Then the winter turned mild but wet. The rains continued longer than I can ever remember. I covered a length of about 16 feet (8 to 10 feet high), but I never quite got the plastic as far as the P. amethyst. It survived the worst cold and still had green on it until almost the end March, but then it died. I have since read that some prefer dry ground when it is cold. I replaced the dead one as soon as Lowes put the spring vines out, and next winter I will cover it.
The section I protected included the bright red P. vitafolia, the maracuya-bearing P. frederick, and what the big-box home-improvement center had labeled as P. victoria (which is lavender), but turns out to be one of the whites, either ‘Charlotte Corday,’ or ‘Constance Elliott.’ Until someone corrects me, I will go with the former, named for the ‘Angel of Assassination’ who went to the guillotine for stabbing-to-death Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bath-tub. She hoped it would end the Reign of Terror. In actuality, it turned them each into martyrs, one for each side, but among Reign-of-Terror floral remembrances, this flower stands out as perhaps the most delicate. As a history teacher, it’s hard to imagine planting anything in my yard with more history than that.
The white one has been blooming for a couple of months, and has set dozens of fruit. The vitafolia and frederick just began blooming last week. The primary pollinators for passion flowers are bumble bees. In our area, that’s the Valley Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa veripuncta. I see them mainly in the late afternoon, most often two of the black females, and occasionally a single tan-orange male. He seems mostly to be checking things out, and I don’t see him land anywhere. They don’t seem to mind either me or the camera, and when the females are intent on a flower, they let me approach within four or five inches.
The bees are just the right height to brush under the five overhanging anthers, picking up pollen on their backs, and carrying it to deposit against the three stigmas. They seem to prefer the whites, visit the frederick only after several visits to each of the available white blossoms, and show no interest at all in the vitafolia.
I first encountered an insectarium at the Berlin zoo, misnamed though, because it housed and displayed both insects (I saw my first walking stick) and spiders (I saw my first Argiope). Spiders are not insects, but both are arthropods. A better name for such a display therefore is "arthropod
arium."
In early June, I began seeing a California Hairstreak Satyrium.
A week later, the first Gulf Fritillary arrived.
The Argentine Ant tends to dominate my yard, but so far I have not seen them tending herds of scale insects.
So far, I have seen four species of spiders in my hedge.
Cheiracanthium mildei needed no introduction: It was already everywhere.
Of the spiders that show up as hedge residents, my two favorites are jumping spiders (family Salticidae). The male Thiodina hespera took exception to being photographed, but I will have the rest of the summer to get a clearer picture. This was the species that first attracted my attention and launched my interest in spiders, some 37 years ago, so we are old friends. Back then, using my first set of close-up lenses, I took my first spider pictures and sent them off to a scholar studying this genus. In those days, the species had no name, and I heard recently that the specialist considered naming the species after me. I don't think my little investigations would have justified that, but it helps explain why I consider this Thiodina almost a member of the family.
The second jumping spider was a female Sassacus vitis. She appeared just after a microscope I had ordered arrived in the mail. She thereby won the right to be my first subject under the new apparatus. On a leaf, her iridescent scales would catch the sun and cast a glint of golden bronze. She is loose again on my hedge, and I will try again to catch a picture of that glint.
The summer and my hedge are still young. I will be traveling some, and trying to write for a portion of each day. But my microscope is brand new, my arthropodarium is just beginning, and school doesn't start for another eight weeks. Life is sweet.
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