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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

The Mysterious and Manicured Met

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Emily Gruzdowich is a sophomore majoring in Art History and Political Science.

Braving the bus, the long blocks and the masses of people, I stood in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's monumental neoclassical facade after a trying four and a half hour bus ride. This Saturday, I was determined to view the Met’s Asian Art Centennial in its entirety. The museum’s comprehensive displays -- capturing five millennia of Asian artworks -- inspired my journey. Encompassing the history, geography and cultural richness of Asia, the Met’s collections of Asian Art enables an audience to revel in the wide-ranging traditions. Coinciding with the centennial, the Japanese Sackler Wing, home to the museum’s Japanese Art collection, has reopened after reinstallation. Justifying the trip as a research endeavor for my seminar class Japanese Narrative Pictures, I momentarily escaped from the stress of midterms and into the mysterious and manicured world of Japanese art.

The range in media and subject matter currently on view is astounding. Accenting the works under observation, the displays are crisply executed and create a seamless viewing process. Logically progressing, the wing follows a mostly chronological order, beginning with monumental Buddha statues, transitioning to ornamental screens, flowing through vertical hanging-scroll landscapes and culminating with ukioy-e prints.Interspersed throughout the wing, fine porcelain wares and trinkets complement the larger neighboring works. This ordered progression reinforces the guiding strands that link Japan to the Buddhist tradition; this connection is explicitly referenced through the inclusion of the Buddha, Bodhisattvas or deities, as well as implicitly through the artists' refined themes and chosen stroke types.

Further personalizing the wing, each room was fitted with a placard describing the American patron who bequeathed the works under observation. I found this interchange between the American connoisseur and the Japanese object illuminating. During the mid-19th century, Japanese art came into vogue. Heavily influencing the trajectory of European art, Japanese culture disseminated through Europe by way of the wood block print.The westernization of Japanese art is termed Japonisme.For reference, the famed impressionist artist Edward Degas created a series of bath scenes that mimicked the Japanese woodblock prints.

While the Japanese wing at the Met does not explore the coinciding artistic interaction of Japanese art with the West, it highlights the monetary exchanges that occurred via the art market. The Met’s substantial Japanese wing and flanking Chinese and Korean collections owe their existences to highly motivated American businessmen in the 1880s. Providing short biographies, the newly renovated wing emphasized the American passion for Asian art. The meticulously organized -- and surprisingly spacious -- Sackler wing is a testament to the continued American interest in non-Western art. Akin to these famed collectors, I am intrigued by the concept of otherness that characterized Japanese art across mediums.

However, there is an inherent irony in the American fervor for collecting Japanese art. Especially at its apex in the 19th century, the United States along with the West termed the isolated people of Meiji Japan uncivilized. Yet these allegedly barbaric people managed to create refined, highly palatable works that mirrored the sublimity of nature. The American people became enamored with the visual concept of a people, but not the people themselves. These ironic parallels are rife within the history of art and, in my belief, make the study of art a worthy subject of scholarship. I was determined to find visual examples to contextualize my final paper topic: religious courtesans (both saints and whores); the dichotomy makes my paper topic ironic. However, when viewing the works in the Japanese Wing, I began to question and connect universal themes. While not endorsing the frustratingly long bus ride to New York, I still encourage you to intimately place yourself in relation to a real work of art. Step away from computer-generated images and allow creations from the past to influence your view of the present.