Hirai Baisen 平井楳仙 (1889 –1969)
Chinese Landscape with Pagoda
Item number: T-3311Size: H 68.1" x W 74.7" (173 x 189.7 cm)
Age: ca 1925
Two-panel folding screen
Ink and colors on paper
Signature: Baisen 楳仙
Seal: »Painted by Hirai Baisen« 比羅居白仙画
A series of perpendicular cliffs, precipitous gorges and towering temple pagodas gives this remarkable landscape painting a sense of peril and exoticism. The setting is not Japan: this painting stems from Hirai Baisen’s Chinese phase, a period that he entered after his travel to China in 1913. Here is a painting with rough strokes of ink on paper in the old tradition of depicting Chinese scenes, a tradition that goes back to Sesshū (1420 –1506).
We see the artist’s great skill in his use of ink. Not only does he use ink in many modalities, varying from intense black to faint grey, but he also varies the wetness of the brush, creating a misty feel to the vegetation, as some sections are vague while others are in sharp focus, lending to an atmosphere of misty mountain peaks. We also see a great variety in brush patterns, with some brushes rough and hard-bristled; Baisen uses these repeatedly to get a sense of wild vegetation on the cliff sides. Another indication of his love for experimentation can be found in the special paper he used for this work: both sides of the screen are painted on a single large, custom-made sheet of paper, which is unusual for this scale of work.
Baisen has used colors sparingly with careful deliberation. To the landscape he added a well-balanced, faint application of red-brown colors. These colors impart an autumnal feel to the scene and at the same time create a color palette that is exotic—it is after all not a scene from Japan, but one from a foreign, yet familiar, culture that Baisen portrays. The light blue color used in one spot, on the coat edge of the single Chinese traveler, adds an exotic touch.
A number of other examples exist from the artist’s period of intense immersion into Chinese expressiveness. For example, a pair of six-panel screens in the Honolulu Academy of Arts displays the same kind of composition and textual strokes.1 Here, too, we see a towering pagoda in the distance over ravines and a precipitous landscape. What differentiates the two works from each other is that the Honolulu screens are solely expressed in ink, whereas in the present work we see his experiment with colors and a more complex composition.
The screen was created in 1925 when Baisen was preparing a series of screens with ink paintings of Chinese landscapes for the sixth Teiten exhibition of 1925. Two other sets of the screens created during this burst of energy have recently been published.2
Baisen is a painter of many styles who succeeds in surprising at every turn.3 A look at another painting by him in this publication item15, (a snow scene of the Kamogawa River dated to 1917) shows how greatly his style changed over a few years. Constant is his technical excellence and his fascination with various materials and tools: the brushes, the paints, and the surfaces. We see him forever experimenting with new ideas. He was clearly an intellectual painter at the cutting edge of the twentieth-century Nihonga movements during his early years.4 The screens are a testament to the genius of Baisen as he revisits the iconic masterpieces of the past and successfully reworks them into a new vocabulary of his own.
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