Special Exhibition: The National Treasure “Folding Screen with Iris Motifs” and Rinpa-Style Flower and Plant Paintings

A byōbu is a wooden frame covered with paper or silk, joined in two, four, six, or eight panels so that it folds. The oldest record of one reaching Japan dates from 686: the Nihon Shoki lists screens among gifts from Silla. It blocks wind, divides a room, and decorates it, and from the Middle Ages screens were made as left–right pairs with related pictures. A pair of six-panel screens is a rokkyoku issō; a single one is an isseki. In the Muromachi period screens carried ink landscapes and flowers and birds; the Momoyama period added colorful genre scenes and city views, and the screen became a main format for large paintings. The Kanō school devised a gold-ground, colored style for flower-and-bird paintings, and Sōtatsu of the Rinpa school left many fine ones. Later came small pillow screens and, for tea gatherings, the furosaki screen.

Look at the two halves of a pair one after the other, moving your eyes from one end to the other; what is drawn may change along the way.

• Maruyama–Shijō school 円山・四条派→Ōkyo's Pine Trees in Snow is a screen.

Rinpa takes its name from the “rin” of Ogata Kōrin; it has also been called the Sōtatsu–Kōrin school, and the name was never unified. Unlike the Kanō and Tosa schools, it had no post as official painters and no inheritance by family: Kōrin took up Sōtatsu's work by admiration, and Sakai Hōitsu took up Kōrin's. In 1815, the hundredth anniversary of Kōrin's death, Hōitsu published a book of his work, which became a foundation for the study of Rinpa. It rests on the tradition of Yamato-e, with gold and silver, clear colors, and bold use of space. Its favorite subjects are tales such as the Tales of Ise and seasonal plants, and its signature technique is tarashikomi, which Sōtatsu devised. Sōtatsu also left many fine screens. The school reached into crafts: Kōetsu's lacquer, Kenzan's ceramics, and “Kōrin patterns” on cloth.

Notice the repeated shapes, whether flocks of cranes, flowers, or waves, and how they are spaced across the gold. The Tokyo National Museum notes that in Kōrin's screens of cranes the birds are spaced rhythmically with similar forms, like patterns on a kimono.