Ogata Kōrin

Painter

  • Born: 1658
  • Birthplace: Kyoto, Japan
  • Died: 1716
  • Place of death: Kyoto, Japan

Japanese painter

Kōrin worked within traditional Japanese aesthetic forms to produce an art of originality and universality that for many epitomizes Japanese taste. His screen of irises is one of the most widely known of all Japanese paintings.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Ogata Kōrin (oh-gah-tah koh-reen) was the son of Ogata Sōken, a wealthy textile merchant and owner of the shop called Kariganeya (Golden House of the Wild Goose), which specialized in the design and weaving of brocades. Kōrin studied painting first with his father and then with Yamamoto Sōken of the Kyōto branch of the Kanō school of painters. The Kanō school represented aristocratic taste in the era before Kōrin, and the Kariganeya’s chief customers were the aristocracy and the feudal lords(daimyo). The daimyo were forced, because of court pressures, to spend enormous sums on clothing, frequently leading to their financial ruin. When the Ogata family’s most important customer, the Empress Tofukumon-in, died in 1678, the Kariganeya’s fortunes began to decline. The Ogata family had lost money in making loans to the daimyo, loans that proved to be uncollectable. An attempt to attract customers from the lower merchant class failed, and by 1697 family bankruptcy had resulted.

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The Ogata family moved in aristocratic circles and the world of learning and the arts, while deriving its livelihood from a business establishment that called for the highest artisan designs and skills. Kōrin continually drew and sketched, studied calligraphy and garden design, and observed the processes and techniques of the textile business. He epitomized the Japanese ideal of a man of learning and refinement, an amateur of the arts, accomplished in painting, poetry, theater, and the tea ceremony. He was a bunjin, or man of letters, and the concept of a dilettante was a positive one.

Life’s Work

When Kōrin’s father, Sōken, died in 1687, he left an equal share of his still valuable property to each of his sons, Tozaburo, the eldest, who succeeded Sōken as the head of the family and the business, Kōrin, and Kenzan. For a decade, Kōrin lived the life of a wealthy heir, no definite profession being required of him. Yet the lifestyle of Kyōto’s upper-middle-class merchants and artisans, intimates of the aristocracy who shared their taste for art and the Nō theater, had ended. The new rising merchant class was less artistic and mostly preoccupied with profit.

In 1697, Tozaburo left the cloth business, moved to Edo (modern Tokyo), and entered the service of a leading feudal lord. The two younger sons realized that they had to earn a living. Kōrin at first designed textiles and lacquerware, while Kenzan, who had studied with the master potter Nonomura Ninsei, began to produce pottery. Kōrin next assisted Kenzan by painting designs on his brother’s pottery, a collaboration of great artistic harmony. Kenzan is renowned today as one of the most important potters in the history of Japanese art.

The greatest influence on Kōrin’s mature style was the work of another pair of collaborators: Honami Kōetsu, a calligrapher and maker of raku tea bowls, and Sōtatsu, head of the Tawaraya, a decorative painting atelier. It is no exaggeration to say that the Japanese consider this quartet—Kōetsu, Sōtatsu, Kōrin, and Kenzan—as representative of the pinnacle of Japanese painterly and calligraphic achievement. These four were related by family as well, and the Ogata family had a home in Takagamine village, a community of artisans founded by Kōetsu.

In 1701, Kōrin achieved the title of hokkyo, an official rank of mastery in painting; by 1704, Kōrin’s finances were failing, and he moved to Edo, the seat of the shogunate government, to try his luck there. In 1707, he entered the service of a daimyo, which secured for him a substantial income, but he returned to Kyōto two years later and began working with his brother Kenzan. Kenzan was forced to close his kiln in 1712. After further financial difficulties from 1713 on, Kōrin died a poor man in 1716. Yet these years of his mature style saw the completion of his two masterpieces, the Irises and the Red and White Plum Blossoms, both folding screens.

Kōrin’s small ceramic wares and fan paintings, as well as his large, twelve-panel folding screens, all show the importance of calligraphy to Japanese art. His sure, crisp, swift line, revealing both elegance and energy, is related to his character; in his character, the Japanese see an expression of themselves. In his work, his calligraphic training is evident in a complex interplay of spatial relations, scale and proportion, space intervals, similarities and resemblances, repetitions, sweeping climaxes, abrupt halts, changes of direction, speed, thickness and thinness, accents and silence, and empty spaces. Kōrin used the traditional Japanese themes of “flowers and grasses,” poetry, and classic secular literary works as well as Sōtatsu’s composition and “wet on wet” technique, Zen “black ink” style, Kanō school drama and power, and the textile techniques of dyeing and stenciling. Continuity with the past, interpreted in a personal style, has long been a Japanese ideal.

The Japanese admire the combination of the powerful and the delicate as an expression of their belief in nonduality, as in Kōrin’s Irises screen, where a resolution is found of the sharp aggressive leaves in the soft yielding flowers on a gold ground that is both solid and void. Expressions of the unity of humankind and nature, the macrocosm and the microcosm, permeate Kōrin’s works and capture the Shinto concept of kami, or the inner living energy of all natural phenomena and space.

Significance

The rise of the style of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”), with its exuberant genre painting and color woodcuts that depict the world of courtesans, Kabuki actors, and the pleasure quarters, caused the momentary eclipse of Ogata Kōrin’s reputation. Eventually, however, the innate preference of the Japanese for works that combine traditional Buddhist values of nonduality and traditional Shinto values of the sacredness of all forms of natural life prevailed. It is this preference, more than any twentieth century appreciation for bold abstract design, that lies behind the Japanese evaluation of Kōrin as central to their concept of a way of life. By the 1820’s, a style of painting called Rimpa (a word meaning “school of Kōrin”) had arisen largely as the result of the efforts of the painter Sakai Hōitsu, who painted in the manner of Kōrin and published books on Kōrin, making Kōrin once again well known.

Bibliography

Elisseeff, Danielle, and Vadime Elisseeff. Art of Japan. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985. A general survey in the Abrams series, very well illustrated, with a section on Kōrin.

Grilli, Elise. The Art of the Japanese Screen. New York: John Weatherhill, 1970. A history and analysis of the Japanese screen as well as a study of key artists and examples. The large color details are exceptional, and Grilli’s compositional and formal analyses of the works are uniquely perceptive.

Leach, Bernard. Kenzan and His Tradition: The Lives and Times of Kōetsu, Sōtatsu, Kōrin, and Kenzan. New York: Transatlantic Arts, 1967. An informative study, with translations of many original documents, by a writer who is himself a master potter. The author’s insight gives his remarks on Kenzan special meaning, and his consideration of Kōrin is also acute.

Lillehoj, Elizabeth, ed. Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting, 1600-1700. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. Includes an essay on Kōrin and Sōtatsu and their patrons as well as a biographical list of seventeenth century Japanese artists.

Link, Howard, and Toru Shimbo, eds. and comps. Exquisite Visions: Rimpa Paintings from Japan. Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1980. A catalog of the exhibition shown at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in the fall of 1980 and at Japan House Gallery in the winter of 1980-1981. An extensive discussion of the Rimpa style and its followers.

Mizuo, Hiroshi. Edo Painting: Sōtatsu and Kōrin. New York: John Weatherhill, 1972. A study of the four principal artists of the Rimpa style—Kōetsu, Sōtatsu, Kōrin, and Kenzan—with fine illustrations. Mizuo, however, overemphasizes the dubious concept that the Rimpa style was a kind of quiet artistic rebellion against the crudity of the shogunate and chōnin tastes. Instead, the daimyo taste encompassed both bu and bun, the aggressive and the aesthetic, exemplifying Asian beliefs.

Shimizu, Yoshiaki, ed. Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture, 1185-1868. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988. The catalog of an extraordinary exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Important for the background of this period and its clear exposition of the coexisting acceptance of warrior traditions (bu) and civilian arts, or the arts of peace (bun).

Stanley-Baker, Joan. “Azuchi-Muromachi and Edo (1573-1868).” In Japanese Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984. A brief, well-informed look at Sōtatsu, Kōetsu, and Kōrin within a broad context of three millennia of Japanese art. Especially effective in placing the Rimpa school within broader political and artistic developments of the Hideyoshi and Tokugawa eras. Illustrated.

1688-1704: Genroku Era.