Shikou Watanabe, Mount Yoshino, folding screen
The emergence and activity of the Rinpa painting school, whose 400 years took place in 2015, may be dated back to the first Edo eve (1615-1868). During this period, the earlier issues of the Japanese yamato-e painting (Heian period [794-1185], corresponding to the second half of the IX century) were resumed and renowed. The ukiyo-e and the Nihonga, as well as the european painting, were thereby influenced. Rinpa means “Kōrin’s school” (from the word pa, or school, of [Ko-]rin), with Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716) being the name of a master. On the basis of reliable sources, however, the founding members of this movement were the calligrapher Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558-1637) and, more importantly, the painter Tawaraya Sōtatsu (died around 1640).
Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Waves at Matsushima, c. 1600–40, right side of a pair of six-panel folding screens, ink, color, gold, and silver on paper (Freer Gallery of Art)
The hallmark of this artistic movement consisted in replacing the contour line and those sturdy, flat, opaque colors, currently adopted until then in the traditional technique, with finely shaded ones, these being more akin to the Buddhist thoughts regarding the illusory essence of the visual world.
An indicative example of adopted technique was tarashikomi (dripping), that is to disseminate, on a still wet first coat of paint, a number of confined pools of color or ink. These tend to randomly expand, depending on the adopted pigment and supporting material (paper, silk, etc.), thus giving rise to blurred stains. The resulting effect is a sense of both dimensionality and ephemerality and thus uncertainty.
The technique adopted in the Rinpa artworks is described as “boneless” (mokkotsu) because, unlike the traditional technique, it didn’t use the ink to delineate the contours, but to create chiaroscuro effects. So, in the Rinpa artworks, the outlines (image’s “backbone”) were not traced at all.
Both the pigments and the materials are natural, thus unlike the ukiyo-e which adopted, in addition to the traditionally natural colors, also chemical pigments like the Prussian blue imported into Japan by the Dutch. The pigments differ each other by weight and, therefore, they are differently absorbed by the underlying material, as a prerequisite for individual effects to come out. This is the case, say, for the seashell powder, coral, azurite, malachite, etc. The pigments were minerals, metals (like gold and silver, utilized as a background for under-painting), plant colors. The glues might be of animal origin, as was the case with the sumi ink adopted to create chiaroscuro effects, a product obtained from soot and fish bone, or from animal skin. “Gofun”, utilized as a background for under-painting and as a fine white top color, was powdered calcium carbonate that was made from cured oyster, clam or scallop shells. The list of the adopted support materials included silk and the washi paper, the latter derived from the mulberry tree and also from bamboo, hemp, rice and wheat. Washi is one of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage objects.
After the Meiji period (1868-1912), Rinpa school’s patterns and techiques happen to be used again by the Nihonga movement linked to the Japanese traditional art, while the counterpart Yōga was under the influence of impressionism coming from the West. Previously, mentions have been made of the artists Nihonga, Uemura Shoen and Yokoyama Taikan; the latter, in particular, successfully used the tarashikomi and mokkotsu technique for his paintings to appear as a sort of colored patterns of faint spots.
The Rinpa school’s influence over the west painting has been found in the Art Nouveau and in the artworks of a number of artists, a prominent representative being Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). This school is continuing to steer the Japanese art of the 21th century: it can be said that such a movement contributed to the creation of modern aesthetics.
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For the first picture see:
http://nomurakakejiku.com/blog/post-3552.html
For the other pictures see their museum website.