Figures on the Wide Screen

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a show of Japanese genre painting

At the end of the 16th century there was virtually no contact at all between Japan and Europe. Yet by one of the odd coincidences of history, art began to move in a similar direction in both places at the same moment: there was a slow shift from high religious subjects toward the themes of everyday life. As Caravaggio painted his gamblers, gypsies and tavern scenes, so dozens of Japanese artists began to set down the details of street festivals and bathhouses on the largest "official" scale known to Japanese art --the byobu, or folding screens, closely detailed and richly ornamented with gold leaf, which decorated the houses of the rich in Kyoto and Edo. These genre pictures give the most complete visual account of everyday life in old Japan that has come down to us, and a delightful selection of them (drawn from the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo) is on view at New York's Japan Society through July 9.

The exhibition contains some sharp reminders of cultural relativity. Since the Japanese were more insular than any other advanced culture, East or West, foreigners were objects of intense curiosity to them. The Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries whose caravels found their way to Japan in the 16th century were known as nambanjin, or "southern barbarians." Naturally, the artists knew next to nothing of the habits of these white-faced extraterrestrials with their quaint, long spindly noses. Yet they became a popular motif on screens: gesturing from their ships, clumsy as grounded kites in their absurd pantaloons. They were to Japan what the willow-pattern Chinaman became to England.

In describing the "Japaneseness" of common life, the artists (most of whose names have perished) devised a kind of visual equivalent to the long social descriptions in Victorian novels. What the genre screens lack in iconic profundity, they make up for in their beguiling chatter of incident and their unfailing decorative sense. Priests, archers, race jockeys, carpenters, nobles, swordsmen, dancing girls, cooks, vegetable sellers, water carriers, lackeys, Kabuki actors, fishermen--the cast of characters is wide, embracing most of the classes and occupations in Japanese society--seen from the detached eyeline of upper-class patronage. The intimations of sympathy with underdogs that occasionally crop up in European genre painting are not to be seen here.

One of the most beautiful byobu is the 17th century Entertainments at a House of Pleasure--an inventory of the resources of a refined, high-class brothel, populated by dozens of crisply drawn, languid silhouettes of women and clients in -- and out of-- their party kimonos. On the right, above the moon-viewing platform, formal pleasures: the brewing of tea, a game of cards, and a manifestly alcoholic banquet.

Beyond the screen, more sake and the music of the samisen. In the courtyard, a ring of dancing girls, stomping about like Dionysiac butterflies under the gaze of their fellow workers on the balcony; and on the left, the bathhouse and the assignation room, where a girl in a bronze-colored robe exhibits one pale, abstract thigh with an air of consummate indifference, while the open door behind her discreetly indicates that her client has just left. Like other screens in the show, this one reminds us that -- despite the wonders of democracy and industrial growth -- the quality of life in Japan may not have remarkably improved in the past three centuries.

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