Kanō School (painting)

Widely regarded as the most influential school of Japanese pictorial art, the Kanō school endured for close to four centuries. It consisted of more than seven generations of artists all members of a single family. It is a singular achievement for one family to have sustained such an enormous range of talent and creativity. With the long-term support and patronage of the shogun class and of the powerful landed aristocracy, the Kanō family passed down stylistic techniques like treasured secrets. Although many of the finest works of Kanō school have not survived—used chiefly as decorations and ornamental embellishments for grand palaces and temples they were subject to natural disasters (primarily earthquakes) as well as fires and warfare—what has survived has secured the school a place in the evolution of Japan’s national art from its earliest dependence on imitating imported Chinese models and techniques to defining its own identity and its own artistic integrity.

Brief History

By the earliest decades of the fifteenth century, Japanese artists found much in the landscape paintings of China to imitate. Japanese artists, trained in the arts and proud of their skills, were attracted to the austere sensibility of the Chinese landscapes—black ink paintings that realized trees, birds, and even mountains with a spare, minimalist style. Kanō Masanobu (1434–1530), the son of a much feared samurai warrior who was also an artist known for his stylized ink-wash landscapes, trained as an artist and studied the cool, cerebral Chinese models with great interest. Although Masanubo lived for close to a century and produced more than three hundred separate works, only a few survive, most notably Zhou Maoshu Appreciating Lotuses, a striking ink drawing in which a renowned eleventh century Confucian master, adrift in a boat dwarfed by a sweeping tree, meditates on floating lotus blooms. It is a haunting image—at once deeply spiritual and profoundly lonesome.

Art historians most credit Kanō Motanubi (1472–1559), one of Masanobu’s two sons, with developing what has come to be called the Kanō school. Kanō landscapes drew on elements of Chinese ink drawing but worked in new directions that would define the school as distinctly Japanese. By this time, the Kanō style had become a dominant expression of the powerful samurai class then in the process of solidifying its position as Japan’s ruling class.

With their emergence into political and social power, the samurai sought the trappings of affluence, most notably artworks for their immense palaces, lavish temples, and grand public buildings. Although these shoguns were brilliant military tacticians and ruthless warriors on the field, they were not versed in the more sophisticated art techniques of the ancient Chinese. Under the considerable influence of this powerful (and wealthy) class, the Kanō school moved away from the cool and intellectual productions that were derived from the Chinese models. The Kanō school—a complex of art studios and prestigious classrooms in the city of Kyoto directed by the descendants of Kanō Masanobu—pushed their productions into newer looks, adding bright colors and bolder, heavier outlines. The images became larger and more dominant—whether a bamboo tree, a bird, a tiger, a mountain, even a dragon. Backgrounds quieted, whereas the subjects were given careful realistic details—tigers looked like they were about to pounce; the trees looked as if they were actually swaying. What the paintings lost in subtleties and artistic technique, they gained in visual appeal and, in turn, popularity. The new nobility embraced the Kanō school, and it quickly became the preferred decorative scheme for the elaborate palaces of the military, the ornate homes of the rich, and the newly constructed temples for the powerful Buddhist monks.

Impact

It is difficult to underestimate the impact of the Kanō House on the definition and evolution of a Japanese national art. Coinciding with the Edo Period, a two-century long era of border security and economic stability, the Kanō school defined Japanese visual art. Given the characteristic media for the Kano artists—large elegant folding screens, ornate room dividers, massive triptych wall panels, murals along the walls of entrances and along garden walkways, finely detailed hanging scrolls—their work circulated far wider than the palaces or monasteries that were the traditional forums for visual art. This was art intended for market consumption, for public display and admiration, for popular appeal. These were ornate decorations intended for homes of the emerging urban merchant class, leading lights of the newly established academic world, as well as the lords of the military establishment. These patrons, although not versed in the subtleties of art appreciation, responded to the big bold images, the finely detailed backgrounds, the vibrant palette. Ownership of works by the Kanō school artists became a mark of status and financial and social achievement as well as taste. By the seventeenth century, its popularity firmly established, the Kanō school introduced to its signature pictorial studies an inlay of gold leaf to the background (introduced specifically by Kanō Eitoku), an effect that caused the image to pop and that gave the images themselves a (literally) rich depth.

Even as the Kanō family continued to direct the pictorial tradition through seven generations, the school began by the mid-nineteenth century to imitate its own templates. Indeed, the most promising art students in the late modern era near the beginnings of Japan’s involvement with the West in the mid-nineteenth century would learn their craft from copybooks full of Kanō school productions. In turn, these students, when the time came to pursue their own careers, relied on those same models to find success. Thus, the Kanō school began simply to recycle its own works, copying than creating. Younger artists grew restless within what they perceived to be the conservative expectations of tradition. The artifacts of the Kanō period, however, defined classic Japanese pictorial art and greatly influenced European artists after Japan’s opening to the West.

Bibliography

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Fischer, Felice, and Kyoko Kinoshita. Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. Print.

Foong, Ping. The Efficacious Landscape. Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Center P, 2015. Print.

Foxwell, Chelsea. Making Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. Print.

Lippit, Yukio. Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2012. Print.

McCormick, Melissa. Tosa Mitshnobu and the Small Scroll. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2009. Print.

McKelway, Matthew Philip, et al. Traditions Unbound: Groundbreaking Painters in Eighteenth-Century Kyoto. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2005. Print.

Screech, Timon. Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2012. Print.