Asian art in New York - the 'Asia Week' celebration in New York City includes exhibitions at various locations, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Magazine Antiques, March, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

This month collectors and admirers of Asian art will be in their element in New York City, where there are many special exhibitions in the galleries and pieces to be sold in the auction rooms and at art and antiques fairs. While "Asia Week," has been an event in the trade for a number of years, more recently the museums have decided to take advantage of the influx of Asian art lovers to the city by holding relevant exhibitions. These vary in scale from large loan shows to tightly focused examinations of works from an institution's collection. Noteworthy among the various events with Asian themes are four exhibitions, two devoted to the arts of China and two to the arts of Japan.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art The World of Scholars' Rocks: Gardens, Studios, and Paintings is on view until August 20. Appreciating the beauty of rocks of arresting shapes, formed by natural means, is a Chinese aesthetic that has no parallel in early Western art and therefore poses a challenge to the uninitiated. This show makes these objects more visually and intellectually accessible to Westerners through the inclusion of some ninety paintings, most drawn from the museum's permanent collection, depicting stones or unusual rock formations that have intrigued artists during the past millennium. More than thirty of what are known as scholars' rocks are installed alongside the paintings. They are so named because they were displayed on tabletops or as freestanding sculptures in the studios of the Chinese intellectual elite. Distinctive rocks have also been venerated by the Chinese as essential aesthetic components of gardens. Visitors to the exhibition need only step inside the Astor Court--a re-created C hinese garden within the museum--to understand the importance of rocks in this context. As early as the eighth century painters incorporated rocks into their compositions, and during the Tang dynasty (618-907) scholars' rocks were judged on four aesthetic grounds; thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling. Additionally, rocks that resembled animals, birds, human figures, or mythological creatures were highly esteemed. In the fourteenth century Chinese landscape painters traditionally included rocks and indeed mountains (either real or imagined) in their works, many of them depicted in expressive calligraphic brushwork. There is no catalogue for this exhibition.

Also at the Metropolitan Museum is a large exhibition of works loaned from a single private collection. On view between March 30 and June 25, it is entitled The Art of Japan from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection. The collection has the singular distinction of being the only one in this country to have been exhibited at the Tokyo National Museum, and it provides a rare opportunity to see extraordinary objects that are otherwise practically inaccessible. Mrs. Burke and her late husband, Jackson, started to collect in 1963, concentrating on ukiyo-e prints, or pictures of the floating world. As their connoisseurship and knowledge evolved, the Burkes sought out objects in other mediums, so that today their collection is a microcosm of the history of Japanese art. The earliest of the two hundred objects on view is a ceramic vessel dating to the Jomon period (c. 2500-1500 B.C.) and the latest objects date from the Edo period (1615-1868). Among the mediums represented are ceramics, lacquer, painting on screens and s crolls, and wood and stone sculptures. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue written by Miyeko Murase and available from the Metropolitan Museum bookstore by telephoning 212-650-2911.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art is one of a very few owners of the rare set of prints entitled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, executed by one of the masters of ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking, Utagawa Hiroshige, between 1856 and 1858. The museum's library acquired the prints as a bound album in the 1930s, where it resided unnoticed for forty years. The works are not only landmarks in the history of Japanese art, but they also vividly and beautifully capture Japanese culture as it existed in the capital city nearly 150 years ago. The series reflects the Japanese predeliction for meisho-e, or pictures of famous places.

At the time these works were produced, Edo (today Tokyo), with approximately one million inhabitants, was the most populous city in the modern world. Hiroshige, who was born Ando Tokutaro, was a member of the samurai class, and, following in his father's professional footsteps, he was a part of the shogun's firefighting organization. As a retainer of the Tokugawa shogun, he was primarily responsible for overseeing the contract workers who lived in barracks in the most prestigious part of the city, just east of Edo Castle. Members of his class often took up other occupations to supplement their income, and Hiroshige learned printmaking, then thought of as a craft, not an art. He studied with Utagawa Toyohiro, who gave him the name Utagawa Hiroshige. When his master died in 1828 Hiroshige turned to landscape, which for the next decade became the setting for his detailed studies of figures. A final transformation in his style occurred in 1856, when, at the age of sixty he renounced the world to become a Buddhis t priest. Not surprisingly his works from the latter part of his life, particularly those that comprise the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, are more emotionally detached and serene in spirit. At the same time many of these works incorporate the innovative use of an abruptly cropped object (such as a lantern, tree, or eagle) rendered in large size at the edge of the print to frame the view of a distant landscape. This compositional innovation made his prints greatly valued by artists, particularly the impressionists and early modernists working in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An edition of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, with essays by Henry D. Smith II and Amy G. Poster, that was originally published in 1986 by George Braziller, has been reprinted by Braziller and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It is available in hardcovers from Braziller at 800-233-4830 and in paper covers from the Brooklyn Museum Shop at 718-638-5000.