Japanese Master

In what amounts to a major shift in Japanese national taste, an almost forgotten Confucian scholar named Tomioka Tessai, who died in 1924 at the age of 88, is emerging as Japan's most popular painter since the Ukiyo-e masters of the 17th and 18th centuries. What makes his sudden rise to fame so surprising is that Tessai's work boldly departs from the polish and finish of Japan's professional, court-painting tradition. Instead, he used a rough, impulsive brushwork that often seems closer to the West than to the Orient.

The Japanese public's enthusiasm for Tessai's work soared in 1955 when Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art turned over its entire three floors to an exhibition of his works. Western-oriented Japanese compared his work to Cezanne and Van Gogh in its vigor and independence; the president of Japan's Society for International Cultural Relations called Tessai "the greatest giant produced by Japan in recent times." Early this year a crowd of 20,000 showed up on the opening day of another Tessai exhibit. Now with a traveling exhibit of 53 Tessai paintings, which opened last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, the U.S. will get its first comprehensive look at Tessai's works.

Ten Thousand Books. Tessai belonged to the Nanga (Southern) or Bunjin (Literary Man) school of scholars for whom art is a secondary accomplishment. To keep their amateur standing clear, they scorned the meticulous brushwork of the professionals. Tessai, who considered his calligraphy an essential part of his art. took up his brush only when the spirit moved him. Not until the final decade of his life did he decide that he had mastered his craft.

Born into a Kyoto family engaged in making priests' robes, Tessai was apprenticed in pottery-making, was encouraged in his scholarly interests as a youth by Rengetsu, a Buddhist nun famed for her verse. But from then on, Tessai was largely self-taught, spent the rest of his life carrying out the ancient Chinese precept: "Read 10,000 books and travel 10,000 miles." Though Tessai traveled extensively throughout Japan--including a visit to the Hairy Ainus in Hokkaido (Tessai sketched them humorously, looking like prime candidates for Cartoonist Al Capp's Lower Slobbovia)--and did drawings and maps for the government topographical office, it was scholarly reading that remained his prime inspiration.

Boating on the Yangtze. One of Tessai's favorites was Sung Dynasty Poet Su Tung-p'o (they shared the same birthday), and Tessai, in his painting Latter Red Cliff Ode, illustrated the poet's description of a night's boating on the Yangtze River near Huang-chou, culminating in the dramatic moment when the poet saw two cranes fly by (later revealed in a dream to have been two Taoist immortals). The painting is now in the ceremonial process of being declared one of Japan's national treasures.

The Patriarchs of Religions Boating Together was done in Tessai's last year. The six figures, representing key personages in Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian religious history, are symbolic of Tessai's belief in the underlying unity of Oriental religions. By his controlled use of sumi-ink splash and brush strokes, Tessai turned his white paper into a water-lily-strewn waterway and sky; at the same time his forceful brushwork created a protomodern example for much that in Western painting passes for abstract expressionism. Looking at these last works, one Japanese critic mused: "They are like flowers that bloom on an aged plum tree." Then he exclaimed in admiration: "Tessai became a dragon."

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