The last of the Rinpa
A white heron, built from flat planes of colour and a clean contour, on a decorative ground touched with gold.1 It is by Kamisaka Sekka, the last great master of Rinpa — the Kyoto tradition of decorative art that began in the seventeenth century and that Sekka, three hundred years on, brought back to life.2
Glasgow, 1901
There is a loop here worth tracing. In 1901 the Japanese government sent Sekka to the Glasgow International Exhibition, where he came face to face with Art Nouveau.3 But Art Nouveau was itself half-Japanese — Europe had built it partly out of Japanese prints and stencils.4 Sekka watched his own tradition come back to him in a foreign accent, took what was useful, and carried it home. This heron is the result: classical Rinpa motifs laid out with a modern designer's sense of the flat page.
Flat colour, before "design"
Look at how it is made: flat planes, hard outline, no gradient, the whole image separating cleanly into layers of colour.5 That is the logic of the printed poster and the silkscreen, and Sekka was thinking it decades before "graphic design" had a name.6 He spent his life arguing that the decorative arts belonged with the fine ones, and taught it in Kyoto.7
A hundred worlds
The heron is a plate from Momoyogusa — "Flowers of a Hundred Worlds," a classical name for the chrysanthemum, and behind it a poem of the year 755, a soldier wishing his love a hundred good nights.8 Longevity, in a flower and a bird. Woodblock, in ink, colour, gold and silver — flat, bordered, made to be printed. Which is exactly what it is again.
Notes & sources
- Kamisaka Sekka, White Heron (Shirosagi), woodblock with gold and silver. The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1988.23.1.19, CC0.
- Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), Kyoto; the last great exponent of Rinpa — the decorative tradition of Kōetsu, Sōtatsu and Kōrin — his revival called "the return of Kōrin." Cleveland; Writers in Kyoto.
- In 1901 Sekka was sent to the Glasgow International Exhibition, where he encountered Art Nouveau (the "Glasgow Style"). Wikipedia; Writers in Kyoto.
- Art Nouveau drew substantially on Japanese prints and stencils (Japonisme).
- Rinpa woodblock: flat colour planes and outline, without gradients — the image separating into flat layers. Cleveland.
- Sekka is held as a pioneer of modern Japanese design, a bridge from Rinpa to twentieth-century graphic design.
- Sekka taught at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts and worked to raise the decorative arts to the level of fine art. Writers in Kyoto.
- Momoyogusa (百々世草), a classical name for the chrysanthemum; from a poem by Mimube no Tarukuni (755) in the Man'yōshū; the chrysanthemum signifies longevity. Cleveland.