Gilded fusuma in Kyoto, Japan - sliding panels

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1994 by Paula Deitz

Like medieval European tapestries that were hung to insulate stone halls, Japanese paintings in the form of fusuma (sliding panels) were integral to their architectural settings. In the case of the four fusuma painted on both sides shown in Plates I and II, their original setting became known during their recent restoration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Old bills and receipts used as backing for one of the panels identified them as partitions between two adjoining rooms of the hojo that overlooks the famous dry garden at the Zen monastery of Ryoanji in Kyoto, Japan. Temple records dated the fusuma to 1606, and their placement was confirmed by a detailed description in a guidebook of 1799.(1) The fusuma from Ryoanji are the earliest known fusuma painted for a Zen monastery in the elaborate polychrome and gold-leaf manner, which succeeded the ink monochrome panels found in monasteries of the Muromachi period (c. 1330-c. 1570).

The oldest surviving hojo is in the sub-temple of Shinjuan at Daitokuji, one of the largest Zen monasteries in Kyoto, a city that remains green with parks and gardens surrounding clusters of temple pavilions. Built in the late fifteenth century, and since reconstructed, the wooden buildings at Shin-juan, joined by verandas and surrounded by gardens, retain the essence and simplicity of the early monasteries. The original fusuma, painted by Soga Jasoku in the late fifteenth century, are still in place. These dream-like monochromatic scenes in ink in the Chinese style show mist-shrouded mountains looming over watery inlets. In the valleys and perched on outcroppings in groves of bamboo trees are pavilions for meditating scholars. Movement through space and time is conveyed by the changing seasons or a shift from daylight to moonlight. In the view of Hiroshi Onishi, a research curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, such scenes express the Japanese admiration of natural beauty and an affinity for the supernatural.(2) The naturalistic panorama may also represent a Zen way of watching life move on.(3)

The explanation of why the suggestive brush-and-ink fusuma at Shin-juan came to be replaced by such richly ornamental gold-leaf and polychrome paintings as those at Ryoanji and other monasteries lies in the samurai patronage that began in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. At that time monasteries, already crucibles of Zen culture, were meeting places for artists, nobles, merchants, and tea masters. At these gatherings the tea ceremony was performed and poems were written about paintings based on Chinese motifs that were created for the occasion. In a sense the taste exhibited in these temple interiors was symbolic of the mutual dependence of Zen monks and their samurai patrons--the former seeking support and the latter cultural enlightenment.

The Zen temples had traditionally propagated the Chinese themes in painting, but those themes were first celebrated in many colors and gold leaf in the castles built by the samurai. Three years after Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), the great samurai chieftain, unified Japan for the first time in 1573, he began to build a seven-story castle on Mount Azuchi overlooking Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto. Completed in 1579, the castle was reported to be unusually splendid for the time and required equally bold and lavish decoration. Oda appointed Kano Eitoku as the chief painter to oversee the decoration of the fixed and sliding panels. By that time the artist had given up the ink monochrome style in favor of a faint gold wash for the sky. In his late style richly colored tree trunks and branches with bright green leaves, pools of blue water, and craggy rocks stood out against swirling clouds of gold leaf applied to the stretched paper. Unlike the panels painted with vast monochromatic landscapes that gave the illusion of depth and distance, this new "flatter" style can be compared to a stage set--a formal park peopled with ancient Chinese sages and immortals acting out Confucian and Taoist themes from a mythic past. And unlike the monochromatic panels, the large areas of gold leaf gave a subtle glimmer to the dimly lit castle interiors.(4)

All of this disappeared when the castle on Mount Azuchi was burned following Oda's assassination. His avenger and successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), continued to employ Kano Eitoku and his sons Kano Takanobu (1571-1618) and Kano Kotonobu to decorate his own castles. Unfortunately, all of these were destroyed by the Tokugawa family, which emerged as the ruling power in Japan not long after Toyotomi's death. However, Ninomaru Palace, the central structure of Nijo Castle in Kyoto, sums up the lavishness of other castles destroyed during the Momoyama period.

Built at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), Ninomaru Palace--with its succession of reception rooms, audience chambers, and private quarters--is reminiscent of the enfilade of ceremonial rooms at Hampton Court in England.(5) Just as the main audience hall at Azuchi was splendidly decorated with Kano Eitoku's painting of trees and birds in polychrome and gold leaf, the main audience rooms at Nijo were decorated by Kano Eitoku's grandson Kano Tanyu, who painted a single massive pine tree on a gold ground. In the room that housed the shogun's weapons, he painted another tree of which the gnarled branches support two hawks that symbolize the strength of the Tokugawa regime.