Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images by Chelsea Foxwell

Author:Chelsea Foxwell [Foxwell, Chelsea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226195971
Google: JcEECgAAQBAJ
Published: 2015-07-20T06:25:37.560527+00:00

5.7 Nishimura Shigenaga, Ue minu washi (The Eagle Does Not Look Up), hand-colored woodblock print; vertical hosoban. Tokyo National Museum. Ex-collection Hayashi Tadamasa.

The discovery of the images’ roots in popular proverbs, where they were linguistically determined as washi and not taka, sheds light upon the subject as it appears in a number of well-known works of Kawanabe Kyōsai, in which the “downward-gazing eagle” eyes or seizes a rabbit, monkey, or other (often surprisingly large) form of prey (fig. 5.8). These paintings suggest that viewers relished the sight of a powerful bird taking up so large a prey, but their bravura style—an exuberant extension of the masculine virility of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ink-painted taka—implies that the other impressive performance they embodied was that of the artist, whose gestural strokes evoke the swift movements of the raptor. This may help to explain the subject’s development among Torii school artists, who used a similar gestural idiom to describe the movements of the aragoto (“rough style”) actor.42 The difference between Kyōsai’s gestural portrayals of fierce washi and the restrained, delicate descriptions of taka in the Pictorial Mirror of Falconry also correlates with the change in his patronage circumstances and in the political connotations of his art during the Meiji period. While the Mirror of Falconry was a learned compendium of poetic, artistic, historical, and scientific sources on taka, produced for enthusiasts in the sport, the “wild” washi paintings are dominated by large-scale compositions on silk and are usually dated to the mid-Meiji period, when he began to paint for domestic and foreign exhibitions and for Western patrons.

It would be misleading to imply, however, that the popularity of predation-themed works on the whole was provoked by the emergence of the foreign market. It seems to have been Hokusai who established predation as a favorite theme of the nineteenth century, and Kyōsai’s Meiji works are heavily indebted to those of the earlier ukiyo-e master. Hokusai repeatedly strayed from the established prototypes of the ue minu washi in his depictions of eagles. His startlingly unconventional eagles turn one eye skyward, humorously contradicting the saying that “the eagle does not look up” (fig. 5.9). It is also noteworthy that Hokusai’s eagle resembles his hawk as much as they both resemble creatures in nature; their identities are determined contextually, through their accoutrements, while even his deliberate shifting of the categories of eagle and fighting cock serves to preserve the established semantic distinctions between the two.43

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