Foreword

d'Harnoncourt, Anne

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Foreword

Anne d'Harnoncourt

Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush

~The protean ink painter, poet, and calligrapher Ike Taiga has been a legendary figure in Japanese culture since his early years as a child prodigy in his native Kyoto, and his work has been admired and collected in Europe and the United States for many decades. It is a delight and an honor to present the first retrospective exhibition of Taiga’s work...

Author

Anne d'Harnoncourt

PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22285

Foreword

The protean ink painter, poet, and calligrapher Ike Taiga has been a legendary figure in Japanese culture since his early years as a child prodigy in his native Kyoto, and his work has been admired and collected in Europe and the United States for many decades. It is a delight and an honor to present the first retrospective exhibition of Taiga’s work outside of Japan, especially since it is here joined by the paintings of his talented wife, Tokuyama Gyokuran, for whom this constitutes the first exhibition anywhere in the world.

The timing of this exhibition is most auspicious, as the United States and Japan celebrate more than 150 years of friendship and the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia marks its tenth anniversary. This spring, cherry blossoms will brighten the landscape around the Museum and in the heart of Philadelphia’s great Fairmount Park, thanks to a decade of gifts of Japanese cherry trees donated through the Japan America Society. And the Museum’s distinguished Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art, Felice Fischer, who has brought her matchless skills to conceiving and organizing this beautiful exhibition, embarks on the thirty-fifth year of her tenure at the Museum with yet another extraordinary international project. The admiration with which Dr. Fischer is widely regarded in museum circles and the world of Japanese studies is reflected in the willingness of so many lenders to part with their beloved paintings in order to share them with a new public.

This exhibition epitomizes the value of partnership, not only in the felicitous resonance between the art of Gyokuran and Taiga but in the invaluable cooperation of the Tokyo National Museum and assistance of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art with the many loans from Japanese public and private collections. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is profoundly honored to be able to exhibit two Japanese National Treasures and more than a dozen important Cultural Properties, a number of which have never before been shown in the United States. At the Tokyo National Museum, we owe special thanks to its Director, Mr. Hiroshi Nozaki, and recently retired Vice-Director, Mr. Yasuhiro Nishioka, and to Mr. Nobuyuki Matsumoto, Supervisor of Planning and Development and Head Curator of Oriental Art. At the Osaka Municipal Museum, we are grateful to the Director, Yutaka Mino, and Curator, Hiroshi Asaka. Colleagues at the Shimane Art Museum and the Museum of Kyoto have offered their enthusiastic assistance as well. We also owe a debt of gratitude to the wise counsel and support of members of the Japanese diplomatic corps, especially His Excellency Motoatsu Sakurai, Ambassador and Consul General in New York, and the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Nations, His Excellency Kenzo Oshima.

Any exhibition that brings together widely scattered works of art can be described as a reunion with special meaning for the public. To be able to contemplate the full range of Taiga’s and Gyokuran’s achievements in more than two hundred scrolls, screens, fans, albums, and sliding doors (fusuma), surely the largest number gathered in one place since their years sharing a convivial but crowded studio, is a delight. More intimate reunions, as in the reuniting of a pair of Taiga screens (one in Japan, one now in the United States) or the reappearance side by side of eight paintings, once part of a twelve-panel screen, are also celebrated here.

A cultural undertaking of this scope and significance, involving years of research and precious works of art lent from collections on two continents, requires a generous consortium of public and private support. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is deeply gratified to have had the assistance of major Japanese companies, such as the Yomiuri Shimbun and All Nippon Airways, as well as funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, along with several other foundation supporters. A larger and enthusiastic group of individual benefactors led by Maxine Lewis, Trustee and Chair of the Museum’s Committee on East Asian Art, and Trustees Emeriti William M. Hollis, Jr., and Henry Wendt made generous contributions in honor of Felice Fischer. The Luther W. Brady Fund for Japanese Research supported initial travel and research, and an endowment at the Museum created by gifts in honor of the late Robert Montgomery Scott helped to make the exhibition itself possible. Mr. Hollis’s gift and an endowment created by a grant for scholarly publications from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided invaluable funding for this remarkable book, which we trust will be a lasting contribution to the field of Japanese painting.

Together with Felice Fischer, I salute her colleagues and fellow authors of essays in this catalogue. Taiga’s intertwined talents as calligrapher and poet are evoked by noted scholars Jonathan Chaves, Sadako Ohki, and Shimatani Hiroyuki, while Gyokurans’s little-known life and Taiga’s use of Chinese printed painting manuals are explored by Kyoko Kinoshita, the invaluable Assistant Curator for this project. The book itself, with its elegantly understated design by Katy Homans, has been the beneficiary of the dedicated attentions of a talented team in the Museum’s Publishing Department: thoughtfully edited by Kathleen Krattenmaker with Joseph Newland and seen through the press by Richard Bonk with his inimitable eye for detail.

A reader not familiar with Taiga’s extraordinary range of styles, skills, and inventive approaches to his subjects might be forgiven for thinking that this volume illustrated the work of many artists, not just two. From the exquisite detail of colorful landscapes in the Chinese manner, to the irrepressible fluidity of the calligraphy, to the simple, bold form of a mountain brushed across a fan, the variety and virtuosity that unfold before us in these pages astonish our contemporary eyes, just as they did admirers in Taiga’s and Gyokuran’s time.

ANNE D’HARNONCOURT
The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer

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