The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Fūjin Raijin-zu, the Wind God and the Thunder God · a pair of two-panel folding screens, the Wind God on the right screen and the Thunder God on the left, each screen nearly square, about 155 by 170 cm · ink and colour on gold leaf over paper · by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, head of a Kyoto painting shop, active from about 1600 to the 1640s; the attribution is traditional and accepted · early seventeenth century, usually dated to the 1620s or 1630s · Kennin-ji, Kyoto, long on deposit at the Kyoto National Museum, a National Treasure of Japan · the unit scored is the pair as one work as it now stands, the empty gold between the screens included; the copies by Ogata Kōrin and Sakai Hōitsu are context
Mode
Sacred figures released into decorative grandeur; two attendant deities lifted from a Buddhist programme and set alone on the gold-ground screen
Mythos
Wind and thunder as opposed and complementary forces, the storm made by their meeting across an empty sky
Phase
The moment before the storm breaks; painted in the early seventeenth century, usually dated to the 1620s or 1630s, the year unknown
Presentation
A pair of two-panel folding screens, each nearly square, standing as screens stand; ink and colour on gold leaf over paper, shown in rotation
Register
Exhilaration and comedy held against grandeur; fear kept at a distance
Scale
Two figures at the outer corners of a field more than three metres long, most of it bare gold
Governing Proposition
On the right screen a green-skinned god rides a dark cloud at the upper outer corner, a long wind bag billowing over his shoulders; on the left a white-skinned god sits in a ring of small drums and swings toward the centre. Both are cut by the outer and upper edges, as if they had just arrived from outside the work. Between them, across the two inner panels and the hinge, there is nothing but gold. The wager of the screens is that the storm need not be painted: that two opposed powers, lifted out of a temple’s iconography and set alone on a bare field, can make the empty gold between them read as the sky about to break, so that the event lies in the space the composition leaves.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work is a pair of two-panel folding screens, made and shown as a pair and scored as one work, since the composition lives in the space between them. Each screen is nearly square, about 155 by 170 centimetres; side by side the pair makes a long horizontal of more than three metres, broken only by the hinge. The ground is gold leaf over paper, and the figures are in ink and colour. On the right screen the Wind God, green-skinned, rides a dark cloud at the upper outer corner, holding a long billowing wind bag over his shoulders and leaning inward. On the left the Thunder God, white-skinned, sits in a ring of small drums on a cloud of his own and swings toward the centre.
Both figures are cut by the outer and upper edges. Part of the drum ring and part of the wind bag run off the screen, so that the gods seem to have just arrived from outside the work. The figures take up well under a fifth of each screen; bare gold is most of the surface, and the two inner panels are almost entirely empty. Between the gods, across those two panels and the gap of the hinge, there is nothing but gold. Two screens, four panels, two figures, two clouds and one ground: that is the whole inventory, and the subtractive test finds almost nothing in it that could go. The Inevitable stands at 8.6, held from the top only because so few parts make necessity easier to hold.
The maker is Tawaraya Sōtatsu, active in Kyoto from about 1600 to the 1640s, the head of a painting shop, the Tawaraya, that made fans and decorated papers. The attribution is traditional and is accepted by the field without serious dissent. The screens are dated to the early seventeenth century, usually to the 1620s or 1630s; the year is not known, and nor is the patron. They belong to Kennin-ji, a Zen temple in Kyoto, and have long been on deposit at the Kyoto National Museum, which shows them in rotation, while the temple displays a high-resolution facsimile. They are a National Treasure of Japan.
Movement II
The two figures descend from Buddhist iconography: the wind and thunder deities who attend the Thousand-Armed Kannon, as in the Kamakura sculptures at Sanjūsangen-dō in Kyoto. The derivation is the field’s, and the exact path by which the images reached the screens is not known. In the temple’s programme they are attendants, fixed in their places around a bodhisattva. On the gold they serve no one. There is no Kannon, no temple, no ground and no human figure; there are two gods, each with a body of his own, a belly, toes and a grin, and a cloud to ride.
What the screens disclose can be stated, and disclosure through image is credited as fully as disclosure in words. The forces of weather are near, physical and comic as well as fearful: the gods are bandy-legged and muscular, almost rustic, and the storm is a matter of their meeting. The empty space between two forces is where the event happens, and the gold is the sky about to break. Sacred figures from the margin of a temple’s iconography can be lifted out and made into persons with appetites. And the myth is built, not evoked: the paired deities are an archetype of opposed and complementary forces, and the two screens are the two powers, with the hinge and the void as the field of their meeting.
The same two axes hold the screens below the summit. The disclosure is of a mood and a vision of nature more than of an articulated human or social condition; the work says little of human life beyond the delight and fear of weather, and its meaning is largely its energy. The Unconcealment stands at 7.6, the lowest figure after The Encompassed, above Fragonard’s The Swing, at 7.3 on this axis, and just below Monet’s Water Lilies, at 7.9. The archetype is held as spectacle and play, without the tragic or cosmological weight of the archetypes at the top of the axis, and the release of the gods from doctrine is implicit rather than built. The Archetypal Deep stands at 8.4, a tenth short of the gate.
Movement III
The inheritance was twofold. There were the Buddhist icons of attendant deities, fixed in a hieratic programme. And there was the gold screen, the format of Momoyama and early Edo grandeur, mostly in the hands of the Kano school, who filled the gold with trees, birds and architecture. Sōtatsu turned both. He took the gods out of their programme and set them alone. He emptied the gold, making the bare ground the subject rather than the setting. He cut his figures at the edges, against the convention of the whole and centred figure. And he did it as a town painter from a shop of fans and papers, outside the official academies, which was a real social and professional stake.
The turn cost something: an empty field risks reading as unfinished. It was not made from nothing, since the tradition of gold screens already prized asymmetry and void, and the precise stake of the commission is unknown; The Swerve stands at 8.6 for that, and not higher. But the emptying of the centre of a gold screen and the cropping of divine figures were still a turn against the Kano manner of filling the gold, and the removal of the figures from their Buddhist programme was no convention at all.
The making answers for the turn. The clouds are painted in pooled, wet ink in which the tones settle into one another, and they give weight and turbulence without a line; they are the only darkness in the field. The figures are drawn with a sure, elastic contour and coloured flat, their bodies foreshortened in motion, and the scarves are pulled through the air in a few long sweeps. The placement is exact: each god cut by the edge where his arrival is most felt, the two gazes meeting across the gold. The Made stands at 9.0, level with The Starry Night on this axis and below the total command of Las Meninas, at 9.8, held from higher because the range of technique is deliberately narrow.
Movement IV
Would another form say this? It would not. The pair of folding screens is the knowledge. The two screens make the two powers separate objects facing each other, and the gap of the hinge is the gap of the sky. In standing use the panels fold, advancing and receding, so that the gods seem to lean out of the gold. The gold leaf turns light into the substance of the sky and changes with the light of the room. Put the image on a hanging scroll or a single panel and the confrontation becomes a pattern; light it evenly and the gold becomes a background. The cropping needs a format with edges that stand in space. The Living Form stands at 9.0: form here is the instrument, as fully as in any picture of this register.
The elevation is of two kinds. The first is grandeur: life-size divine figures, the gold catching what light there is in a dim temple room, a storm gathering across three metres. The second is the comic sublime: the Thunder God caught at the top of his motion, drumsticks raised and scarf streaming, like a dancer at the height of a leap. The height recurs in each figure, in the dark spill of the clouds, and above all in the empty centre, which is charged rather than vacant. But terror is kept at a distance; this is exhilaration more than dread, and it does not reach the awe of the greatest religious images. The Sublime stands at 8.4, well below Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees, at 9.1 on this axis, the deeper elevation in the same format.
One law governs the whole. Take the two most distant elements: the dense, dark, formless cloud and the bare, bright, flat gold; or the hieratic origin of the figures and their comic vitality. Both pairs obey the same law, forces in motion across an empty, luminous field, rendered with a flat ground and full-bodied figures. The screens mirror without repeating: green against white, bag against drums, a lean one way against a lean the other, and the asymmetry is one system. The law reconciles sacred and comic, icon and decoration, weight and void. The Inner Law stands at 8.9, and not higher, because the elements are few, and narrowness does not stand for coherence.
Movement V
About a century after the screens were made, Ogata Kōrin copied them closely; his copy is in the Tokyo National Museum, and on its reverse Sakai Hōitsu later painted Summer and Autumn Grasses. Hōitsu, about a century after Kōrin, also made a copy of his own after Kōrin’s. Kōrin moved his gods inward and enlarged them, and the void was reduced; what Sōtatsu’s placement did becomes visible in the copy that changed it. A lineage made by copying one image across three generations is the clearest reach that can be named: the work became the touchstone of a school, among the founding works of what was later called Rinpa. Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.7 on that force and that reach. The wider spread of the manner, chiefly through Kōrin, and its passage into European design through the export of Japanese design in the later nineteenth century belong to the school more than to this work, and are discounted. Kōrin’s own Irises (8.3), from the same lineage, stands two tenths below.
The copying is also the best evidence of the work’s depth. Kōrin returned to it and Hōitsu returned to Kōrin, each finding something to restate, and modern scholarship has returned to the attribution, the sources, the date, the patron and the meaning of the empty field. On return the screens yield: the two faces differ, the clouds differ in density, and the void reads differently as the eye moves from one screen to the other. But the yield is mostly formal; one does not find a new meaning on each visit so much as the same pleasure renewed, and The Bottomless Well stands at 8.3. The screens hold the weather, two sacred figures, the comic body and, by implication, the world under the sky; there is no family, labour, state or history, and The Encompassed at 6.6 describes the form.
After about four centuries the form is whole: the two figures, the two clouds and the gold void are fully legible, and the presence has been continuous, at the temple, in the museum’s rotation and in reproduction everywhere in Japan. Gold leaf on paper is fragile in its kind, and the rotation protects it. The Imperishable at 9.3 is the highest of the twelve. Hokusai’s Fine Wind, Clear Morning (8.4) and Tōhaku’s Pine Trees (8.4) stand a tenth below, Monet’s Water Lilies (8.6) a tenth above, and Hokusai’s The Great Wave (8.9) well above, on disclosure, reach and the archetype. In the museum, in its turn, the gods still arrive from outside the gold, and the storm between them is still unpainted.
Act III · The Twelve
Apply the subtractive test and almost nothing yields. There are two figures, two clouds and a field. Remove either god and the other has nothing to answer: the work is the confrontation across the gap. Remove the clouds and the gods stand in nothing, for the dark pooled ink is the only weight that lets the gold read as sky. Remove the gold and the void becomes a background rather than the weather itself. The cropping is required too: it pushes the figures inward, as if just arrived. What can be argued against is the fluttering drapery and the swing of the wind bag, fuller than bare need. Held below the top band because so few elements make necessity easier to hold than in a crowded room such as Las Meninas, at 9.0 on this axis.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited as fully as disclosure in words, and three things can be stated. The forces of weather are near, physical and comic as well as fearful: the gods grin, bandy-legged and muscular, almost rustic, and the storm is a matter of their meeting. The empty space between two forces is where the event happens; the gold is the sky about to break. And sacred figures from the margin of a temple’s iconography can be lifted out and made into persons with appetites. What holds the axis is that the disclosure is of a mood and a vision of nature more than of an articulated human or social condition: the work says little of human life beyond the delight and fear of weather, and its meaning is largely its energy.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The elevation is of two kinds, and both are real. The first is grandeur: life-size divine figures, the gold catching light in a dim temple room, a storm gathering across more than three metres. The second is the comic sublime: the Thunder God caught at the top of his motion, drumsticks raised and scarf streaming, like a dancer at the height of a leap. The height recurs in each figure, in the dark spill of the clouds, and above all in the empty centre, which is charged rather than vacant. Terror is held at a distance. This is exhilaration more than dread, and it does not reach the awe of the greatest religious images: high and repeated, within a narrow range of feeling.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The paired storm deities, wind and thunder, are an archetype of opposed and complementary forces, and the work constructs their opposition in its structure: the two screens are the two powers, the hinge and the void between them are the field of their meeting, and the storm exists only in the space the composition leaves. The particulars stay particular, with bellies, toes and grins of their own. What holds the axis below the summit band is depth: the opposition is held as spectacle and play, without tragic or cosmological weight. Lifted from a programme in which they attend a bodhisattva, the gods here serve no one; that release from doctrine is implicit rather than built.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance was twofold: Buddhist icons of attendant deities, fixed in a hieratic programme, and the gold screen as the format of Momoyama and early Edo grandeur, mostly in the hands of the Kano school, who filled the gold with trees, birds and architecture. Sōtatsu turned both. He set the gods alone, with no Kannon, no temple and no ground; he emptied the gold, making the bare field the subject; he cut his figures at the edges, against the convention of the whole, centred figure. He did it as a town painter from a shop of fans and papers, outside the academies. The turn cost: the empty field risks reading as unfinished. Held short of the top because the tradition already prized asymmetry and void, and the commission is unknown.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Would another form say this? It would not. The pair of folding screens is the knowledge. The two screens make the two powers separate objects facing each other; the gap of the hinge is the gap of the sky; the folding of the panels in standing use advances and recesses the figures, so that the gods seem to lean out of the gold; and the gold leaf turns light into the substance of the sky, changing with the light of the room. On a hanging scroll the confrontation becomes a pattern; lit evenly, the gold becomes a background. The cropping needs a format with edges that stand in space. Kōrin’s copy, which moves the figures in from the edges, shows by contrast how much of the meaning lay in the placement.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: about four centuries of attention, of which the best is the copying itself. Kōrin returned to the screens and Hōitsu returned to Kōrin, each finding something to restate, and modern scholarship has returned to the attribution, the sources, the date, the patron and the meaning of the empty field. On return the work yields: the two faces differ, the clouds differ in density, and the void reads differently as the eye moves between the screens. But the yield is mostly formal and the semantic depth is limited. One does not find a new meaning on each visit so much as the same pleasure renewed: strong evidence for a narrow well.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is Kyoto painting in the decades after 1600, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the work reorganised what a gold screen could do with figures and void, and it stands among the founding works of what was later called Rinpa, with its decorative design, bold placement and flat gold, and its swerve from academic painting. The wider spread of that manner runs chiefly through Kōrin, and its passage into European design is credited to the school, not to this work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ogata Kōrin, about a century later, copied the screens closely, and Sakai Hōitsu, about a century after him, copied Kōrin’s copy, a lineage made by copying one image across three generations.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole. The two figures, the two clouds and the gold void are fully legible, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous. The screens are held by Kennin-ji, designated a National Treasure, shown in rotation at the Kyoto National Museum, and reproduced to the point of ubiquity in Japan; the temple itself shows a high-resolution facsimile. Fabric: gold leaf on paper is fragile in its kind, and the screens need rotation to last; the present state of the surface is not stated here. The row for centuries with form whole, in its lower half for the fragility of the kind, with wide presence adding at most a tenth.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged as command of ink and colour on gold leaf in a pair of screens. The making is load-bearing. The clouds are painted in pooled, wet ink in which the tones settle into one another, giving weight and turbulence without line. The figures are drawn with a sure, elastic contour, colour laid flat, the bodies foreshortened in motion; the scarves are pulled through the air in a few long sweeps. The placement is exact: each god cut by the edge at the point where his arrival is most felt, the two gazes meeting across the gold. Level with The Starry Night on this axis, below the total command of Las Meninas (9.8), and held from higher because the range of technique is deliberately narrow.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dense, dark, formless cloud and the bare, bright, flat gold; or the hieratic origin of the figures and their comic vitality. One law governs them all: forces in motion across an empty, luminous field, rendered with a flat ground and full-bodied figures. The two screens mirror without repeating, green against white, bag against drums, a lean one way against a lean the other, and the asymmetry is one system. The law is not narrow in kind: it reconciles sacred and comic, icon and decoration, weight and void. Held below the top band because the range of elements is small, and narrowness does not stand for coherence.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in the weather; the sacred, in two deities from a Buddhist programme; the comic body, in their bellies, toes and grins; and, by implication, the human world under the sky, which is absent. These are integrated, not listed: the sacred and the natural are one storm. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is not there: no family, no labour, no state, no history, and no consciousness beyond the gods’ own vitality. A small set of orders, fully held, in a form of two figures on a field of gold; the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, then The Living Form and The Made at 9.0 and The Inner Law at 8.9. A pair of screens whole after about four centuries and continuously present; a format in which the hinge is the gap of the sky and the gold is the sky itself; a command of pooled ink, elastic contour and exact placement in which each god is cut by the edge where his arrival is most felt; and one law of forces moving across an empty, luminous field, reconciling sacred and comic, weight and void.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the weather, two sacred figures and the comic body, held in one storm; family, labour, state and history absent by the form’s choice. Above it, The Unconcealment at 7.6: a disclosure of mood and a vision of nature more than of a human condition, its meaning largely its energy. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.3, a formal yield more than a semantic one, and The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: exhilaration rather than awe, and an archetype held as spectacle and play.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two of five: The Imperishable at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short by a tenth and The Unconcealment 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 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 101.4, an average of 8.45 that displays 8.5, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, five tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the screens as an image and in their history, their format, their sources and their copies; the fabric, the condition of the gold and the extent of remounting and retouching, is known less well and is not described. The work scored is the pair of two-panel folding screens, Wind God and Thunder God, Fūjin Raijin-zu, by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, at Kennin-ji, Kyoto, the right and left screens as one work as they now stand, the empty gold between them included. Not in the unit: the Kamakura sculptures of the wind and thunder deities at Sanjūsangen-dō, as an instance of the source; Ogata Kōrin’s copy in the Tokyo National Museum, with Sakai Hōitsu’s Summer and Autumn Grasses on its reverse; Hōitsu’s copy after Kōrin; the facsimile at Kennin-ji; and the Rinpa painters who followed. These are context and reach. No words are quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them whether the screens carry a signature, a seal or any inscription, their exact dimensions, the year of painting, the patron and the commission, the path by which the figures’ sources reached the painter and any further source for the Thunder God’s pose, the name and attribution of the pooled-ink technique as used here, the state of the gold and of the clouds and the history of remounting, and readings of the two gods’ expressions against other paired figures.