Princeton exhibit focuses on group art-making in 18th-century Japan
The "Multiple Hands" exhibit at the Princeton Art Museum explores collective art-making from centuries ago.
The "Multiple Hands" exhibit at the Princeton Art Museum explores collective art-making from centuries ago.
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The Princeton Art Museum opens a show Saturday (Oct. 8) that explores Japanese collective art-making in the 1700s. “Multiple Hands: Collective Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Painting” focuses on two types of cooperative composition – collaborative and workshop.
The workshop system revolves around a master artist who composes a work, then delegates assistants who execute details and apply colors. Only the master signs the work, and the imprint of multiple hands often goes unrecognized. The exhibit illustrates how workshop painting production was widely practiced in early modern Japan.
Xiaojin Wu, the museum’s associate curator of Asian art, arranged the display. The show includes a large pair of hanging scrolls titled “Four Accomplishments,” representative of the prodigious and influential Kano school workshop, run by generations of the Kano clan from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Only master Kano Tsunenobu (1636-1713) signed the work, but varied brushwork styles can be discovered in different sections of the silk paintings.
“The various painting styles,” said Wu, “indicate the involvement of multiple workshop members in producing ‘Four Accomplishments’ – two scrolls that present the four accomplishments of man: chess, music, reading and painting.”
Collaborative paintings, on the other hand, explicitly acknowledge the touch of all artists involved through their individual seals or signatures. Eighteenth-century Japanese artists often worked together on compositions.
Leading painters Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795) and Tani Buncho (1763-1841) participated in gatherings where they and their friends engaged in spontaneous creative enterprises. The large scroll, “Miscellaneous Paintings and Calligraphy for the Third Year of the Bunsei Era,” from 1820, exemplifies the mass collaborative approach.
“This work is signed by three major painters – Tani Buncho, Watanabe Kazan and Sakai Hoitsu – and the signatures of 66 additional artists are also recorded on the painting,” said Wu. “This open acknowledgment of the participation of many artists in creating these paintings invites viewers to search for and compare numerous individual styles within a single work of art.”
In conjunction with the exhibit, the museum will host “An Evening of Japanese Art and Culture” from 6:30-9 p.m. Nov. 3. The free event includes Japanese food, art and entertainment.
