Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942)


Taisho (1912-1926) or Showa era (1926-1989), circa 1920-1940Set of 12 kakejiku (vertical hanging scrolls); ink and colours on silk in silk mounts, depicting scenes of the 12 months as listed below, each signed Sekka with a seal; with a three-tiered wooden tomobako storage box, the outside of the lid inscribed with the names of the scenes listed below, in groups of four, the inside of the lid inscribed Junitsuki no zu (Pictures of the 12 Months) and signed Sekka hitsu (Brushed by Sekka) with a seal. Each overall: 193cm x 34.5cm (76in x 13½in); image: 115cm x 20cm (45¼in x 7 7/8in) (13).
|The scenes depicted are:First Month: Pulling up pine saplings on the first Day of the RatSecond Month: Bush warbler and plum blossom, a harbinger of springThird Month: Peach blossomFourth Month: Cherry-blossom viewingFifth Month: IrisesSixth Month: Planting out rice seedlingsSeventh Month: Early autumn flowersEighth Month: Moon viewingNinth Month: Fulling (softening) cloth beneath the moonTenth Month: White chrysanthemumsEleventh Month: Woman of Ohara (a village outside Kyoto) carrying firewood on her headTwelfth Month: Cranes by a streamDescended from a family of Imperial Palace bodyguards, Kamisaka Sekka grew up steeped in the pictorial and craft traditions of his native Kyoto. After a time studying under the Shijo-school painter Suzuki Zuigen (1848-1901), in 1890 Sekka's interest in design and decoration led him to seek instruction from Kishi Kokei (1839-1922) and it was from this time that he began to research and emulate the works of the Rinpa (sometimes spelled Rimpa) tradition. Founded in the seventeenth century and taking its title (a later coinage) from the second syllable of the art-name of the celebrated Kyoto painter Ogata Korin (1658-1716), the Rinpa style adopted the pictorial vocabulary of courtly art and reformulated it in dramatic compositions characterized by rich mineral pigments and gold leaf; large, flat areas of colour producing a semi-abstract effect; and sensitivity to the evanescence of things and the passage of the seasons. Revived in Edo (present-day Tokyo) for the first time a century after Korin's death by Sakai Hoitsu (1761-1828) and his leading pupil Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858), Rinpa enjoyed a second rebirth thanks to Sekka, who extended global awareness of its charms thanks to his role not only as a painter but also as a teacher and an 'art director' in the modern sense, commissioning work in lacquer and other commercial goods; it is in large part thanks to Sekka that the Rinpa style is so prevalent even today in Japanese craft and graphic design. Many of Sekka's earlier and more celebrated works came in the form of book designs, starting with Chigusa (A Thousand Grasses), first published in 1899 just before he travelled to the Glasgow International Exhibition (1901) and continuing with Kairo (The Sea Route, 1902), Cho senshu (A Thousand Kinds of Butterfly), and the famous Momoyogusa (A World of Things, 1910). In these books Sekka both explored and challenged the interpretations of traditional Japanese design pursued by the contemporary European art nouveau manner, 'pushing the familiar tension between realism and abstraction further than his predecessors' (see Rachel Saunders, Le Japon Artistique: Japanese Floral Pattern Design in the Art Nouveau Era, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2010, p.23). In his later paintings, however, Sekka developed a gentler expression of time-honoured Kyoto themes and Rinpa styles, as in the present set of twelve scrolls where the main motif—the side of a hill, the curve of a stream, the trunk of an ancient plum tree, or the moon hanging in the sky—is often animated by the introduction of a human figure, while hard-edged forms executed in mineral pigments are contrasted with softer washes and sometimes with passages executed in the tarashikomi technique, long associated with Rinpa, in which one layer of paint is applied over another before the first has dried to produce a random marbled effect. Like Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891) of Tokyo a generation earlier, Sekka of Kyoto presents us here not just with a reinvigorated catalogue of traditional subjects but also a nostalgic evocation of the traditional relationship between people and their natural environment.For published examples of paintings by Sekka in a similar format, see Donald A. Wood and Yuko Ikeda eds., Kamisaka Sekka: Rimpa Master, Pioneer of Modern Design, Tokyo and Birmingham AL, The National Museum of Modern Art and Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003, cat. nos.152, 159, 168, the last depicting the Ninth Month scene.