Dreams of lacquer: Shibata Zeshin's Japan
DREAMS OF LACQUER, JAPAN OF SHIBATA ZESHIN
with the help of the Catherine and Thomas Edson Collection, San Antonio Museum of Art
April 6 - July 15, 2012
Set of lacquered boxes with willow and water wheel © San Antonio Museum of Art / photo: John Deane
70 lacquers, screens, paintings, decorative and customary objects presented for the first time in France and Paris, will illustrate, at the Cernuschi Museum, the virtuoso art of Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891).
Shibata Zeshin's career is at the crossroads of two great eras in Japanese history: the Japan of the samurai (Edo era) and the Japan of modernity (Meiji era). His paintings and lacquers bear witness to the artistic, political and social transformations of the late XNUMXth century.e century. Painter in the service of wealthy merchants, townspeople and temples under the former government, he was appointed painter of the Office of the Imperial Household after the restoration of Emperor Meiji in 1868. With great sensitivity, trained in realistic painting with the painters of the Kyôto Maruyama-Shijô school, in Ukiyo-e style engraving with the painter Kuniyoshi, he distinguished himself in paintings in ink on silk, creating trompe-l'oeil effects, but still invented colored lacquer painting on paper. In the art of lacquer, he developed unique decorative processes, such as black lacquers with tone-on-tone decoration, lacquers imitating iron or bronze or, to add refinement, the fine texture of rosewood. His pictorial compositions, often extremely concise, evoke the famous Japanese poems stripped down and incisive, the haiku he was in love with.
His works presented in the Universal Exhibitions, including that of Vienna in 1873 and that of Paris in 1884, as well as in the national exhibitions were rewarded with many prizes, admired and collected by Western amateurs, like the English Dresser and the German Samuel Bing, creator of Art Nouveau.
They played a major role in the evolution of taste in the West.
Curator: Christine Shimizu, Chief Curator of Heritage, Director of the Cernuschi Museum
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