Archive for category: Focus On

This series on Japanese art history — a subject sadly underrepresented in most introductory art history courses — was originally published on the culture blog Paperfoxes Run Run. Thanks Sarah!

Part 1. THE JOMON PERIOD

Flame Style Storage Vessel, c. 2500 BCE, Cleveland Museum of Art

Things are blurry in 10,000 BCE, but right now archaeologists are pretty sure that the oldest pottery vessels ever found come from Japan. Historians tend to have extremely clear dates for the history of Japan, and even though things are muddy way-back-when in the Jomon period, most historians divide the period into roughly three parts: Early Jomon, Middle Jomon, and Late Jomon — makes sense. Some even divide it further, but there’s really no need to for our purposes. Why is pottery like this interesting? Well, it tells us a lot about the people who made them — stuff we could never know without the vessels’ existence.

Vessel, Early Jomon Period, Tokyo National Museum

Early Jomon
First, let’s look at an example of early Jomon work (what you see above is Middle Jomon; we’ll get there). These simple, portable vessels (left)were made by hand by hunters and gatherers — that is, a people who moved around, and weren’t settled — using the coil method, around 10,000 BCE. The coil method is a fancy term for rolling ropes of clay and then ‘coiling’ them into a vessel-shape and smushing the sides flat together. Most of these vessels have patterns impressed into them using common objects like fabric or rope — in fact, “jomon” means rope in Japanese, and thus came the term for the period itself.

Middle Jomon
A huge shift occurred around 2,500 BCE, when vessels like the one at the top of this article appeared. You can tell these vessels are much more fragile, with elaborate protrusions and more decoration. Moreover, they’re extremely well preserved, not an easy task for delicate low-fired pottery. So, from vessels like these, we can guess that our Jomon friends became more sedentary, settling in one place long enough to create ceremonies in which vessels like this — dubbed “Flame-Style” — would have been used.

Statuette, Late J?mon Period, Tokyo National Museum

Late Jomon
Historians date the final period of Jomon to around 1,500 BCE. Ceramic dolls like this (right), called doku, were made as well as vessels, and we believe they were part of an elaborate ritual, perhaps a burial one, or even one that had to do with sympathetic magic, in which the doll would ‘receive’ the illness of a person. Notice in this large-eyed example the missing leg — many of these elaborately decorated dolls have limbs broken off, which hint at its ritual purpose.

Unfortunately, since this stuff is so old, we don’t have concrete information about any of it — no writings of any kind exist. But even though we can’t say with absolute certainty what any of these vessels or dolls were used for, they give us enough clues for us to make very well-educated guesses.

Go more in depth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History: Jomon Culture essay.

Katsushika Hokusai, Fisherman on a Rock

Surimono are a particular kind of Japanese print that were produced during the Edo period (1615-1868). These little prints have been the focus of many exhibitions lately, and for good reason. These are sumptuous, expensive, beautiful, tiny little prints (about 6×6″) that utilize poetry as well as images, and had a specific purpose. Only made in runs of less than a hundred, surimono were sent to friends and acquaintances as new year’s greetings, to show the sender’s refined taste.

They were comissioned by the rich members of poetry clubs, who would send a short poem to a print designer, who would then assist the poet in designing an image to go along with his poem. A calligrapher would write the poem on the design, which would then be sent to a print workshop that would create the print. Thus, all aspects of a surimono were essential to the final product, and the combining of clever, simple poetry along with a masterfully created image would allow its cultured recipient to further contemplate the meaning of the poem.

Almost all of the most famous Japanese printmakers of the Edo period designed surimono, and the image to the left is an example of one by Hokusai. In it, we can see a fisherman perched on a rock; the muted color palette and elegantly written poem at the top right corner show that it is an example of a finely made print.

Albrecht Durer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving.

Albrecht Durer is one of the most famous artists of the Northern Renaissance. A German painter and printmaker, Durer was incredibly talented at detailed renderings of allegorical figures, as well as portraits and nature studies. See his photograph-like Young Hare, where you can make out the individual hairs on the rabbit’s coat; the story goes that he caught and trained the rabbit to sit still on his drawing table so he could paint a watercolor of it.

Melencolia I is a print made by Durer in 1514, and it’s a constant source of speculation for scholars because Durer includes so many symbols, a staple of Northern Renaissance art. Often interpreted as a representation of artistic “melancholy” or frustration, the print is definitely one worth exploring visually, letting your eyes get lost in the details.