The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ogata Kōrin · Kakitsubata-zu byōbu, the iris screens · a pair of six-panel folding screens, right and left, twelve panels in all, each screen a long low field more than twice as wide as it is high · ink and mineral colour, azurite blues and malachite green, on gold leaf laid in squares over paper · signed Hokkyō Kōrin, and so painted after 1701, usually dated to the first years of the eighteenth century · the Nezu Museum, Tokyo, a National Treasure of Japan · the unit scored is the pair as one work; Kōrin’s later pair, Irises at Yatsuhashi, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is context
Mode
Literary painting turned into pattern; the illustrated episode with its people, its water and its bridge removed, on the gold-ground screen
Mythos
The journey into exile and the beloved left behind, carried by the flowers that bear her name in the poem and by the gold as the distance
Phase
One season, the iris in flower; painted after 1701, when Kōrin took the rank of hokkyō, and shown each spring when the irises flower
Presentation
A pair of six-panel folding screens, standing in zigzag at a seated eye height; mineral blues and green with ink on gold leaf laid in squares over paper
Register
Splendour and calm, held at one pitch across twelve panels; the longing kept beneath the pattern
Scale
One plant at one scale, in clusters repeated across two fields of gold
Governing Proposition
Across twelve panels of gold leaf, clusters of irises in two blues and one green rise and fall along the right screen and run down a long diagonal on the left into open gold. There is no ground line, no water, no sky, no figure and no bridge. The flowers are the ones a traveller saw at Yatsuhashi in the ninth episode of the Tales of Ise, and named in a poem whose lines open on the syllables of their name. The wager of the screens is that a literary episode can be carried whole by what it leaves out: that the flowers, set as a repeated pattern on a field of light, can hold the longing the poem held, with the gold standing for the distance the man had come.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work is a pair of six-panel folding screens, right and left, made as a pair, shown as a pair, and scored as one work, since the composition runs from one into the other. Each screen is a long low band, more than twice as wide as it is high, meant to stand in zigzag on the floor of a room and to be seen at a seated or kneeling eye height. The ground is gold leaf laid in squares over paper, and the squares show as a faint lattice across both fields. On it are irises in ink and mineral colour: azurite blues in the flowers, a deeper and a lighter, and malachite green in the leaves. That is the whole palette, one ground and three working colours. There is no ground line, no water, no sky, no figure and no bridge.
The signature reads Hokkyō Kōrin. Hokkyō is an honorary rank, and Kōrin received it in 1701, so the screens are later than that; they are usually dated to the first years of the eighteenth century, and the exact year is not known. Ogata Kōrin lived from 1658 to 1716. He was the son of the Kariganeya, a Kyoto textile house, and he came to painting from the world of the pattern and the dyed robe. The screens are in the Nezu Museum in Tokyo, and they are a National Treasure of Japan. The museum shows them for a few weeks each spring, when the irises in its garden are in flower.
The two fields are composed differently. On the right screen the plants run in a band across all six panels, rising and falling, dense, a procession. On the left they move in a broad diagonal, high at the right and low at the left, and thin as they go, leaving a wide field of open gold. The clusters recur in near-identical form within each screen and between them, which can be seen in any reproduction. Whether a pattern or stencil-like template was used for some of them has been argued and is not settled. The screens are read as screens are, from right to left: the full band first, then the thinning diagonal, then the gold.
Movement II
The subject is the ninth episode of the Tales of Ise. A courtier, by tradition Narihira, is on a journey into exile from the capital. At Yatsuhashi in Mikawa, the Eight Bridges, the water branches like the legs of a spider under eight bridges. Irises are flowering there, and he makes a poem whose five lines open on the syllables of kakitsubata, the iris: karagoromo / kitsutsu narenishi / tsuma shi areba / harubaru kinuru / tabi o shi zo omou. A robe long worn, a wife long familiar, a distance come from far, and the journey grieved. The plant is hidden in the poem, and the wife is hidden in the plant.
Painters of the Tosa and Kanō schools had shown the episode as a story: the courtier and his companions, the bridges and the stream. Kōrin takes away everything but the flowers. The bridge, the traveller, his companions, the water and the poem are gone, and what is left is what the man saw and named. That absence is the work’s claim. The flowers carry what the poem carried, and the gold, being nothing, is the water, the air and the distance at once. A viewer who knows the episode stands where the traveller stood. What can be stated is that a story can be told by its absences, and that nature, seen by a designer, is pattern: the plant given as unit and interval, so that the ordering of a field becomes a way of seeing.
The same absence sets the limit. Much of what the screens give is a state, splendour and calm, and the first of their propositions depends on a literary memory that the image does not supply to a viewer without it. Nothing on the gold tells such a viewer that a journey or a wife is in question. The archetype, exile and the one left behind, is evoked by a deliberate withholding, which is more than allusion and less than construction, and the particular, one plant in one season, stays wholly particular. The Unconcealment at 7.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 are the two lowest figures after The Encompassed, and they hold the screens below the summit. Hokusai’s Fine Wind, Clear Morning (8.4), the nearest posted work in place and kind, stands a tenth above, and its sacred mountain, built on the sheet, is much of the difference.
Movement III
The screens inherited three things. There were the illustrations of the Tales of Ise, which gave the episode as narrative. There was the gold-ground screen as a format of display. And there was Tawaraya Sōtatsu, whose screens and fans had already taken court literature into flat, bold colour on gold, and whom Kōrin studied. The departure is in what Kōrin removed and in what he put in its place: the narrative goes whole, and the plant is given as a repeated pattern on an unbounded ground, close to the language of the textile and the lacquer box from which he came. A literary picture becomes a design without ceasing to be literary. The road had been opened by Sōtatsu and the decorative screen was a living genre, which is why The Swerve stands at 8.4 and not higher.
The stake was a merchant’s son, who had spent his inheritance and was newly a painter of rank, making a major pair of screens in a manner closer to the dyer’s workshop than to the academy. The making answers for it. The two blues are laid as flat fields of different depth, so that each flower has front and back without line or shading. The green leaves are long blades of one colour, and their edges carry the whole drawing. The pigments are thick and even, and the gold is left to do the work of space. The placement of each cluster against the gold is exact, and the intervals between the clusters are the composition. The command of the screen as an object, its folds and its pair, is complete.
The cost is the repeated cluster. If the clusters were laid from a template, as has been argued, the work trades the variety of the hand for the regularity of the pattern, and some of them read as stamped rather than observed. In a medium where the dyer’s template was a native means, that is a chosen economy, and the placement and the colour are not mechanical; but it is a real economy, and it holds The Made at 9.1, a step below the command of Las Meninas (9.2), whose making stands near the top of the axis. The same module bears on necessity. The spacing is measured, and the band would sag without a cluster; but a work built from a repeated unit concedes that a unit could be added or removed with a change of rhythm and no change of meaning. The Inevitable stands at 8.2.
Movement IV
A screen stands in zigzag. Its panels advance and recede, the gold catches the light at different angles on alternate leaves, and the clusters on the forward folds come toward the viewer while those in the valleys sink. The rhythm of the plants is the rhythm of the folds, and as the viewer walks past, the field moves. The pair gives the journey: one screen, then the other, the full procession and then the thinning line, with the open gold of the left as the far bank. Laid flat, as in reproduction, the screens become a pattern and lose their depth and their time. The form is the knowledge, and The Living Form stands at 8.8, held below the top only because the play of the zigzag is shared by every screen of the type.
The height is of one register, and it is sustained. The gold is a field of light with no source, which in a dim room under lamplight or reflected daylight glows from within and changes as one moves. Against it the blue is the most saturated colour that pigment allowed in Kōrin’s Kyoto, laid in two tones. And there is the rhythm: the eye rides the band of the right screen as a line of music and drops down the diagonal of the left into the open gold. The height recurs across all twelve panels without slackening. It is grandeur of colour, with no terror in it and no awe of scale, one high note held. Monet’s Water Lilies (8.6), the decorative cycle of flowers and water, rises in more than one kind and stands three tenths above.
One law holds the whole. Take the dense cluster at the right edge of the right screen and the last thin plants at the far left of the left, before the open gold: they are the same plant in the same light, at the same scale, on the same ground, in the same two blues and one green, ordered by the same interval. Nothing breaks the law: no figure, no line of water, no bridge, no change of scale. The gold is the same everywhere, which is why it can be water at one point and distance at another without contradiction. But the law governs completely because it covers little, one plant, one season and one palette, and The Inner Law stands at 8.6 for its size, below Water Lilies, which holds more under one law.
Movement V
The screens are whole after about three hundred and twenty years. The image is the image Kōrin made; no part that carries its meaning is lost or replaced, and the gold, the blues and the green read as they were meant to. Paper, gold leaf and mineral pigment on a folding structure are fragile in their kind, remounting is the ordinary history of a screen of this age, and the condition of this pair beyond that is not stated here. Their presence is real and deep in Japan, and intermittent by design: the few weeks of the spring showing protect the fabric, and the work’s season and the world’s coincide. The Imperishable at 9.2 is the highest of the twelve, at the foot of the row for works of centuries with form whole, because the screens are long withheld from view and fragile in their kind.
The intrinsic force is high. A literary subject is carried wholly by repeated decorative pattern on gold, the line between painting and design is crossed in a major format by a painter of rank, and the screens are the defining statement of what came to be called Rinpa, after Kōrin’s own name. Their own reach was narrow and late, and where they were kept before the twentieth century is not settled here. What spread was the manner: into prints, pattern books and the Kōrin pattern in textiles and crafts, and through Sakai Hōitsu’s revival a century later and Suzuki Kiitsu after him. In the modern period the screens became the emblem of Japanese decorative painting. Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.3 because reach through the maker’s style weighs more than reach through this object.
Kōrin returned to the subject in a later pair, Irises at Yatsuhashi, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and there the bridge is restored. Whether that is an answer to what he had withheld is one of the open questions, with the template, the date, and how far to read the screens through the Ise episode and how far as pure pattern; the examination is mostly of the last century, and The Bottomless Well stands at 8.1. The screens hold the plant and its season, a poem and a memory, exile and the beloved, and the household’s decorative order; there is no figure, labour, city, state or history, and The Encompassed at 6.4 describes the form. The Tale of Genji Scrolls (8.4), from the same court tradition, stands a tenth above, and the tenth is that axis alone. At the Nezu, in spring, the bridge is still not drawn, and the flowers still stand where the traveller saw them.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged cluster by cluster and interval by interval. What carries the work is not any one plant but the spacing: the gold between the clusters is the water, the distance travelled and the rest in the music, and it is measured. Take away a cluster in the right screen and the band sags; take away the open gold of the left and the diagonal loses its run toward the edge. The pair is required: the right screen’s dense procession and the left screen’s thinning diagonal are the outbound way and the far shore. What yields is the logic of the repeated unit: a work built from a module concedes that a cluster could be added or removed with a change of rhythm but not of meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited as fully as in words, and two things can be stated. A story can be told by its absences: the screens are the Eight Bridges episode with the bridge, the traveller and the poem removed, and what remains, the flowers he saw and named, carries the longing the poem carried. And nature seen by a designer is pattern: the plant is given as unit and interval, and the eye learns that the ordering of a field is itself a way of seeing. Both hold outside Edo Kyoto. What holds the axis here is that much of what the screens give is a state, splendour and calm, and the first proposition depends on a literary memory the image does not supply.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation of one register, sustained rather than single. The gold ground is the first height: a field of light with no source, which in a dim room glows from within and changes as one moves. The second is the blue against it, the most saturated colour that pigment allowed in Kōrin’s Kyoto, laid in two tones so that the flowers have depth without modelling. The third is the rhythm: the eye rides the right screen’s band as a line of music, then drops down the long diagonal of the left into open gold. The height recurs across all twelve panels and does not slacken. It is grandeur of colour, with no terror and no awe of scale: one high note sustained, where the greatest pictures rise in more than one kind.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetype is the journey into exile and the memory of the one left behind. In the ninth episode of the Tales of Ise a traveller at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa, where the water branches under eight bridges, sees the irises and makes a poem whose lines open on the syllables of kakitsubata, the iris. Some of this is built: the flowers are the acrostic, the plant is the name inside the poem, and the gold is the distance. But the bridge and the man are absent, and the archetype is carried by the viewer’s memory rather than by a structure in the image. The particular stays wholly particular. Myth evoked by a deliberate absence, which is more than allusion and less than construction.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance: the illustrations of the Tales of Ise that showed the episode as narrative, with the courtier, his companions, the bridges and the stream; the gold-ground screen as a format of display; and Tawaraya Sōtatsu, who had already taken court literature into flat, bold colour on gold. The departure: the narrative is removed whole, figures, bridge and water, and the plant is given as a repeated pattern on an unbounded ground, close to the language of the textile and the lacquer box from which Kōrin came. A literary picture becomes a design without ceasing to be literary. The stake was real for a merchant’s son newly a painter of rank. Held below the top because Sōtatsu had opened the road and the decorative screen was a living genre.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The folding screen stands in zigzag: the panels advance and recede, the gold catches light at different angles on alternate leaves, and the clusters on the forward folds come toward the viewer while those in the valleys sink. The rhythm of the plants is the rhythm of the folds, and as the viewer moves the field moves. The pair gives the journey: one screen, then the other, with the open gold of the left as the far bank. The gold ground is water, air and distance at once because it is none of them, and only such a field can make an absent bridge present. Held below the top because the zigzag’s play is shared with every screen of the type.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: about three hundred and twenty years, but a sustained critical examination mostly of the last century. The open questions are real: whether and how templates were used, and what that says of painting and design; how far the screens should be read through the Ise episode and how far as pure pattern; the date, and the relation to the later pair that restores the bridge, as if Kōrin returned to supply what he had withheld; and the analogy with music, rhythm and interval, to which the literature keeps returning. The screens yield on return in the play of the folds and the shifts in the blue. Held lower because the questions turn on method and context more than on depths of meaning in the image.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is Kyoto painting around 1700, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: a literary subject carried wholly by repeated decorative pattern on gold, and the line between painting and design crossed in a major format by a painter of rank. It is the defining statement of what came to be called Rinpa, after Kōrin’s own name. The discount: the reach of this object is narrow and late, and what spread was the maker’s manner more than the screens. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the manner carried into prints, pattern books and the Kōrin pattern in textiles and crafts; Sakai Hōitsu’s revival a century later; and, in the modern period, the screens as the emblem of Japanese decorative painting.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three hundred and twenty years. Form: whole. The image is the image Kōrin made; no part that carries its meaning is lost or replaced, and the gold, the blues and the green read as they were meant to. Presence: a National Treasure in the Nezu Museum, shown for a few weeks a year. Presence is real and deep in Japan and intermittent by design, and the seasonal showing protects the fabric rather than marking a gap in survival. Fabric: paper, gold leaf and mineral pigment on a folding structure are fragile in their kind, and remounting is the ordinary history of a screen of this age. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of mineral pigment on gold leaf on a folding screen. The making is load-bearing. The two blues are laid as flat fields of different depth, so that each flower has front and back without line or shading; the green leaves are long blades of one colour whose edges carry the whole drawing; the placement of each cluster against the gold is exact, and the intervals are the composition. The command of the screen as an object, its folds and its pair, is complete. The cost: repetition by template, if that is what it is, trades the variety of the hand for the regularity of the pattern, and some clusters read as stamped rather than observed. A chosen economy, and a real one, a step below the summit of the axis.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dense cluster at the right edge of the right screen and the last thin plants at the far left of the left, before the open gold. They obey one law. Everything in the work is a plant in one light, at one scale, on one ground, drawn in the same two blues and one green and ordered by the same interval. Nothing breaks it: no figure, no line of water, no bridge, no change of scale. The gold is the same everywhere, which is why it can be water at one point and distance at another without contradiction. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one plant, one season and one palette, and the law governs it completely because it covers so little.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in the plant and its season; literature and memory, in the Ise episode carried by absence; the journey, exile and the beloved left behind, through the poem; time, in the season of flowering, which the spring showing repeats each year; and the decorative order of household and temple, in the screen as an object of use. They are integrated, since the absence is the structure that binds the poem to the plants. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no figure, no labour, no city, no state, no history, and no sacred order beyond what a setting brings. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Made at 9.1, then The Living Form at 8.8 and The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.6. A pair of screens whole after about three hundred and twenty years, its seasonal showing a protection rather than a gap; a command of mineral blue and green on gold in which the intervals are the composition; a folding form whose zigzag is the rhythm of the plants; a gold field that glows from within under a blue held across twelve panels; and one law of plant, light and interval from the first cluster to the open gold.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: the plant and its season, a poem and a memory, exile and the beloved, held in one structure; figure, labour, city, state and history absent by the form’s choice. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and The Unconcealment at 7.7: an archetype evoked by a deliberate absence rather than built in the image, and a disclosure that depends on a literary memory the gold does not supply. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.1 and The Inevitable at 8.2: questions of method and context more than of meaning, and a repeated module that lets part of the work be exchanged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.2 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 by two, The Unconcealment at 7.7 by eight and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 by nine. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 99.0, an average of 8.25 that displays 8.3, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, seven tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the screens as an image and as a type, and of the object in its main record: the signature, the medium, the pair and the collection are held firmly; the commission, the exact date and the condition of the surface are not known in detail. The work scored is the pair of six-panel folding screens, Irises, Kakitsubata-zu byōbu, by Ogata Kōrin, in the Nezu Museum, Tokyo, the right and left screens as one work, made, shown and composed as a pair. Remounting and repair, the ordinary history of a screen of its age, bear on its survival only; no part that carries the image is known to be lost or replaced. Not in the unit: Kōrin’s later pair, Irises at Yatsuhashi, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which draws the bridge; the ninth episode of the Tales of Ise, on which both draw; the screens and fans of Tawaraya Sōtatsu; and the Rinpa painters who followed, Sakai Hōitsu and Suzuki Kiitsu. These are context and reach. The words quoted are the signature, Hokkyō Kōrin, and the poem of the Ise episode, in romanisation; the English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal. The use of a template for the repeated clusters is given as argued, not settled. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dimensions, the year of painting, the year of the designation as a National Treasure, the commission and the patron, the temple in which the screens are said to have been kept and the circumstances of their acquisition for the collection that became the Nezu Museum, the museum’s founding date, the pigment analysis, the number of repeated units, the present state of the surface, and the passage of the screens’ language into European art.