INK PLAY

5 1 R I N K P L A Y E D W A R D K A M E N S It is a single folding screen of six panels, brush-stroked ink on paper in an unassuming frame, in height about that of an average adult’s shoulders, and when unfolded about eleven feet wide. A trained eye can read the texts inscribed across this surface, in the upper part of each panel, in two, three, or four horizontally dispersed vertical lines, one poem per panel, on the theme of love in the traditional Japanese form, the uta or waka; below each poem, in characters as large as those in the poems themselves, the names (or sobriquets) of each poem’s composer, all six of whom are women, of the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. (We do not know their personal names.) The calligraphic strokes are bold, energetic. Much of the surface is open, free of text. There is neither an artist’s signature nor any identifying seal. But the calligraphy is recognizably the work of Konoe Nobutada (1565–1614), one of the most admired and innovative figures in the history of this major genre of Japanese art. The artistic practices and traditions that yield such artifacts as this have long since earned the appellation shodō, literally ‘‘the way (or art) of writing,’’ which means that calligraphy stands in honor alongside the arts of poetry (kadō) and tea (chadō), and even 5 2 Y K O N O E N O B U T A D A , Wa k a p o e m s . Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., B.A., 1913, Fund and a gift from Peggy and Richard M. Danziger, LL.B. 1963. 5 3 R the martial arts (budō) – revered disciplines that are characterized, among other things, by cross-generational transmissions (often reaching back through many centuries) of essential conventions and protocols. Classifying and elevating terminology of this kind also sets calligraphic art apart as a subcategory within the broader array of traditional East Asian visual forms, especially painting (e or kaiga), although the two are understood to be closely allied, in part because both practices share the central role of the brush ( fude, hitsu) and in many cases the common medium of ink (sumi, boku), and also because written texts often (though not always) accompany and interact with nonverbal images in and on the same visual surface, or adjacent or overlapping surfaces, in the most common formats in which such art is and was made – in albums; in scrolls designed to be unrolled as they are viewed, horizontally, or hung, stationary and vertically; or on sliding screen doors; or on folding screens. The screen I discuss here is an example of a distinctive stage in the development of Japanese calligraphy within this larger context , in which visual designs consisting solely of text on the panels of folding screens – a format often used for pictorial matter alone, or for both text and picture – were coming to the fore, and Nobutada is one of the best known of the artists of his day who worked in this medium. Writing circa 1799, the artist and critic Kuwayama Gyokushū named him as one of the paradigm-defining artists of his time, along with a contemporary calligrapher, Shōkadō Shōjō, and the slightly later painters Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Ogata Kōrin. Gyokushū did not specifically mention the medium of Sōtatsu’s or Kōrin’s works (whether e or kaiga, perhaps because this was self-evident), but he distinguished Nobutada’s work from theirs by referring to his art as ‘‘ink play’’ (giboku), a term that emphasizes both the substance the artist used and the inventiveness seen in that use – and even, perhaps, some of the freedom Nobutada exercised whenever he put brush to paper. Technically, the term giboku derives from Song- and Yuan-period Chinese art criticism, and in most of its uses in Japan, as here, it strongly suggests what the art historian Yukio Lippit calls the ‘‘elegant amateurity’’ that had, by Gyokushū’s time, come to be highly prized in calligraphic works such...