Masters
of Bamboo: Japanese Baskets and Sculpture in the Cotsen Collection
is an exhibition that draws on the richness and breadth of the
approximately nine hundred works Mr. Lloyd L. Cotsen generously
donated to the Asian Art Museum in 2001. These works comprise
the largest public collection of Japanese bamboo art in the world.
A variety of baskets from the Cotsen Collection is regularly on
view in the museum’s Japanese galleries (second floor),
with the selection changing twice a year. Masters of Bamboo,
however, approaches the collection’s masterworks in an entirely
new way; the exhibition is organized around the network of master-
disciple relationships through which makers of these baskets are
interconnected. On view in the museum’s Hambrecht Gallery
through May 6, 2007, Masters of Bamboo features one artwork
each by 76 bamboo artists representing most of the major lineages
in the three key geographic regions—Western Japan, focused
in Osaka and Kyoto; Eastern Japan, focused mainly in Tochigi,
Niigata, and Tokyo prefectures; and Kyushu, focused primarily
in Oita prefecture—over the past 150 years. Many of the
artworks in the exhibition are on view publicly for the first
time.
Masters of Bamboo was organized by the Asian Art Museum,
and curated by Melissa Rinne, the museum’s assistant curator
of Japanese art. The exhibition is accompanied by a 128-page publication
in which Ms. Rinne, in collaboration with bamboo specialist Koichiro
Okada, provides an overview of this intriguing art form. She also
traces the network of master-disciple influences that constitute
the major lineages, or lines of artistic transmission, in bamboo
art, from the nineteenth century through artists who are active
today. These lineages have never before been described in a systematic
way, and they provide a means of comprehending Japanese bamboo
work from a global perspective.
In comparison
with Japan’s other decorative and applied arts, such as
ceramics or textiles, bamboo basketry is a relatively small-scale
art form that requires decades to learn; most members of the younger
generation of recognized bamboo artists are in their forties and
fifties, following years of training and development. Another
unique aspect of this form of Japanese decorative art is that
almost every step of production is accomplished by a single person:
Bamboo work requires a sensitive and individualistic approach
to the material, which does not lend itself to division of labor
within a local industry and cannot rely on the forces of nature.
As artist Fujinuma Noboru (b. 1945) says, “Unlike the ceramist,
for whom the fires of the kiln play an important role in the outcome,
the bamboo artist bears full responsibility for every step of
the creative process. Without splitting the bamboo and working
through each of the various steps oneself, one cannot get the
‘feel’ of each individual bamboo culm and thus know
for what kind of piece it will be best suited. And there are no
shortcuts in bamboo—there is no way to mechanize the process”
(personal communication with the curator, October 2005). Because
of these qualities, it is very difficult to achieve technical
mastery of the bamboo medium without spending the initial years
of one’s training under the guidance of someone already
skilled at working with bamboo as an artistic material.
For this reason,
at some time in their careers most major bamboo artists have been
formally or informally associated with one of a handful of artistic
lineages that have served as the centers of artistic bamboo training
for generation after generation. Most of these lineages are based
in three regions: Western Japan; Eastern Japan; and Kyushu. While
artists must learn a full corpus of techniques, regional characteristics
or aesthetic tendencies emblematic of certain lineages appear
in the output of the artists in those lineages.
In a traditional
arrangement a senior artist has a number of live-in students who
work very closely with the teacher, assisting with works produced
in quantity while learning by observation the signature techniques
used by the master to make his one-of-a kind pieces for competitive
juried exhibitions. Often the secrets of how to successfully produce
a given effect are known only to members of a lineage, and are
reproduced and expanded upon by future generations. While hierarchical
succession is not the only way in which artistic techniques have
been disseminated (there has also been much lateral influence
and cross-referencing within generations through organized bamboo
art associations and exhibitions), the master-disciple relationship
forms the technical and often aesthetic foundation from which
a young bamboo artist begins a career—a foundation that
in many cases suffuses his or her art for a lifetime.
The artists featured in Masters of Bamboo, living from
the early 1800s through the present, have transformed bamboo work
from a sophisticated skill-driven artisanal occupation into a
highly innovative art form. While every work in the exhibition
has been chosen for its artistic merit and for its demonstration
of the maker’s abilities, it will become evident to museum
visitors that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bamboo artists
were more involved than their later counterparts with reproducing
Chinese models or medieval Japanese-style baskets for practitioners
of the sencha (steeped green tea) and matcha
(powdered green tea) tea ceremonies, as well as with making baskets
that, though of superior artistic sensibility, had primarily utilitarian
uses. In contrast the artworks in this exhibition made in the
late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries bespeak the blossoming
of bamboo craft into a highly creative and often sculptural means
of artistic expression.
The Cotsen Collection, with its remarkable scope, is perhaps the
only collection anywhere from whose contents an exhibition such
as Masters of Bamboo could be organized. For example,
the exhibition includes:
•
baskets by all five generations of the Hayakawa Shokosai lineage,
considered to be the progenitor of bamboo work as an art: Hayakawa
Shokosai I (1815–1897) is said to have been the first bamboo
artist to sign his baskets, and Hayakawa Shokosai V (b. 1932)
is one of the five artists in the bamboo art genre to have been
designated Living National Treasures by the Japanese government.
(Masters of Bamboo features works by all five Living
National Treasures.)
• the work of Wada Waichisai I (1815–1909) of Osaka
prefecture as well as works by nineteen artists from the various
lineages that developed out of his formal or informal tutelage,
including four generations of the Tanabe Chikuunsai lineage based
in Sakai, Osaka.
• baskets by Iizuka Hosai I (1851–1915) and ten of
his direct and indirect artistic descendents.
• a piece by legendary teacher Iwao Kounsai (1901–1992)
of Beppu, Oita prefecture, as well as nine works from the generations
of successors who benefited directly or indirectly from his teachings.
One of these is by Kajiwara Aya, the first female artist to be
officially admitted into one of the two major bamboo artist associations.
In addition to breadth, the Cotsen Collection boasts superb quality.
Many of the pieces selected for the exhibition are renowned masterworks,
representing the height of the artists’ oeuvres. The remarkable
susudake bamboo flower basket by Sakaguchi Sounsai (1899–1967)
seems as strikingly original today as it did when it was made.
Shimmering of Heated Air by Shono Shounsai, the first
bamboo artist to be named by the Japanese government as a Living
National Treasure, and Core by Tanabe Chikuunsai III
expand the realm of the traditional flower basket to new sculptural
heights, while artist Yako Hodo dispenses with the vessel form
altogether in his extraordinary spherical masterwork My UFO.
On
the occasion of the Masters of Bamboo exhibition, the
Asian Art Museum has received seven new bamboo works by important
artists not previously represented in the Lloyd Cotsen Japanese
Bamboo Basket Collection. The generous donation from the artists
of these works not only enriches the range of bamboo artistry
in this already extraordinary collection but also serves to reinforce
the Asian Art Museum’s commitment to it.
Lloyd
Cotsen Japanese Bamboo Basket Collection
Many friends of the Asian Art Museum may already be familiar with
Mr. Cotsen’s Japanese baskets. In the year 2000 the museum
hosted the critically acclaimed traveling exhibition Bamboo
Masterworks: Japanese Baskets from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection,
which featured more than 100 baskets and offered visitors a rare
opportunity to view the extraordinary beauty and intricate craftsmanship
as well as the historical and cultural importance of this unique
art form. Mr. Cotsen, a resident of Los Angeles and the former
CEO and chairman of the Neutrogena Corporation, assembled his
collection during the course of what he calls a “forty-year
love affair” with Japanese bamboo baskets. In explaining
their appeal, he says, “I was attracted by the tensions
created by the balancing of forces: of cohesion and chaos, structure
and nature, refinement and exuberance, and ultimately, simplicity
and complexity.”
The nearly
900 baskets in the collection range in date from the Edo period
(1615–1868) to the present. The techniques of weaving bamboo
in strips vary with each basket, which may include such materials
as old bamboo arrow shafts, driftwood, cloud-pattern bamboo (named
for its intermittent mottling), and smoke bamboo (taken from the
rafters of old country cottages exposed to smoke for more than
100 years). Many of the baskets were originally made for the tea
ceremony or for flower arranging, activities with profound artistic
and philosophical meanings in Japanese culture. And many were
created by artists who represent basket-making lineages and by
others who have been designated in Japan as “Living National
Treasures” in recognition of their mastery.
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