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By Kay Itoi
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On the right as one enters the gallery hangs Gustav Klimt's "Nuda Veritas" (1899), a monumental picture of a sensual female awash in glorious gold and blue. And on the left: "Wave at Matsushima," a spectacular gold-and-green six- panel screen by the 18th-century Japanese master Korin Ogata. This is a rare combination in a museum exhibition; curators usually don't mix traditional with modern, let alone Japanese with Western, paintings. But the new exhibition "Rimpa" (through Oct. 3) at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, blends all four. The result is one of the season's most visually gorgeous and conceptually ambitious shows.
Curator Ryo Furuta mounted the exhibit to pose one question: what is Rimpa? Literally "the Rin school," the style refers to a centuries-old Japanese art school named after Korin Ogata, its chief exponent. Characterized by the lavish use of gold, silver and bold colors and flat, highly ornamental designs, Rimpa is reflected not only in contemporary Japanese works but also in the show's Western pieces, like Klimt's "Life Is a Struggle--'Golden Knight' " (1903) and "Screen for Olivier Sainsere" (1903) by Odilon Redon. Though art scholars have long associated Rimpa pieces with the decorative, gold-coated paintings by these European artists, this is the first show to explore their relationship so directly. "It is a daring and significant survey," says Eiji Tanaka, an Osaka-based Rimpa scholar. "I wish I had curated it."
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The Rimpa influence over Western art is not nearly as clear-cut as European artists' infatuation with Japan's Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the Edo period (1603-1867). Furuta, however, builds a convincing case connecting the two. Japonism, the influence of Japanese artistic and stylistic themes, was already fashionable in the West in the second half of the 19th century. Then Rimpa paintings and crafts were a big hit at the world fairs in London (1862) and Paris (1867 and 1878); Klimt, the leading Viennese painter of the time, is likely to have encountered such works at the 1873 Vienna World Fair. In 1890 the influential French art critic Louis Gonse wrote glowingly of Ogata's work. Artists then may have adopted the Rimpa technique of ignoring perspective and emphasizing "a flat logic of composition by paying more attention to the surface than the depth of the image," says Furuta. Around then Europe's own ornamental style, art nouveau, flourished too.
The curator hopes the show will provoke further discussion on the link between Rimpa and the Western works and perhaps lead to breakthrough discoveries. Who knows--maybe Klimt left a sketch based on Ogata's waves. But even without evidence, it's easy to appreciate the creative bond between a Klimt and an Ogata that hang side by side.
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