Tsuji Kakō 都路華香 (1870 –1931)
Young Pines
Item number: T-3151LSize: H 53.3" x W 106.1" (135.5 x 269.5 cm)
Age: circa 1920
Pair of six-panel folding screens
Ink on gold leaf
Signed (right screen): Kakō kore egaku »Kakō painted this« 華香画之.
Seals: To Yoshikage In »the seal of To Yoshikage« 都良景印, Kakō 華香
Signed (left screen): Kakō ga »Painting by Kakō« 華香画.
Seals: To Yoshikage In »the seal of To Yoshikage« 都良景印, Kakō 華香
Many rows of young pines march across this pair of screens, in a exuberant celebration of the New Year. A Japanese custom of the season is to place decorations with young pine seedlings, known as kadomatsu, at entrances of homes to bring good luck in the new year. Here the artist has placed a great multitude of pine seedlings, seeming to bring a prodigious amount of good fortune in the new year for the owner screen's owner.
The artist, Tsuji Kakō (1870 –1951), has placed the pines, the sole decoration of the screens, entirely within the lower half of the screen, thereby focusing our attention to the plants and the unusual composition of the screens. Following the examples of other screens by this noted artist, the plants are abstracted repetitions of each other, varying only in the intensity of ink density. These plants appear in groups, streaming across the screens in currents, close to and far from the viewer.
A further interesting characteristic of the screens is the brush technique. Large-scale screens were typically drawn while the mounted paper was lying flat on the floor. The artist has, however, placed the paper on a slanted surface for the drawing of the pine trunks, so that the ink could collect in pools at the bottom of each plant. This was by no means an easy task, as too great a slope of the paper would let the ink spill down the screen. This effect may seem unimportant but it fulfills two important goals: the many pools of ink have the effect of reinforcing the theme of repetitions across the screen surfaces and also to anchor the pines more firmly in the gold ground: thanks to the pools of ink, the pines curiously do not appear to float in space, but rather seem firmly planted into the frosty winter earth.
Tsuji Kakō is one of the most celebrated Nihonga artists of the twentieth century and has long been well represented in Western collections.1 The Griffith and Patricia Way Collection,2 for example, contains several outstanding works by this remarkable painter, who succeeded more than almost any other Japanese artist of his time in combining Japanese painting tradition with modernist ideas of art. The abstraction of simple motifs was a theme that again and again found representation within his works—in this work, certainly, with young pines, but also in other key works with bamboo plants, ocean waves, and even flying ducks.3 He has found acceptance in Japan as well, and the recent important retrospective exhibition of his works at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (2006) is but one indication of the growing world-wide recognition of Kakō’s place among the great Japanese artists of the modern era.
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