Wise Warriors, Artfully Attired
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 22, 2009
For the Japanese samurai, dying well was the best revenge. This elite warrior class began to play a central role in Japan’s history and culture around the eighth century and in time evolved into the country’s ruling caste. Highly cultivated in arts like poetry, monochrome ink painting and the tea ceremony, this class adhered to a strict code of honor built around loyalty, self-discipline, obligation and the shame of failure. Its most unbending principle was that a samurai’s death should bring honor to his family and descendants and to the emperor or clan he served.
Fighting heroically to the end while looking good was what it was all about, even if the end turned out to be seppuku — ritual suicide — one way to avoid humiliation or assuage shame. Regardless, arms and armor of suitable grandeur and efficiency were required, and it was by meeting these requirements that generations of artisans helped shape the defining opposition of centuries of Japanese aesthetics: utter, even hermetic simplicity versus off-the-charts ostentation.
This opposition lies at the heart of “Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868,” a sumptuous, revelatory and long-awaited exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that gives the term split personality a whole new meaning. The show’s armor and helmets are among the world’s most lavish works of multimedia art, and — in the opposite corner, as it were — its plain and simple sword blades, presented au naturel, offer subtleties of silhouette and tone that could challenge the most ardent admirer of Minimalism.
“Art of the Samurai” represents a decade of work by Morihiro Ogawa, special consultant for Japanese arms and armor at the Met; he was assisted by Donald J. La Rocca, curator of the museum’s arms and armor department. All but about 10 of its 214 objects, including lacquer sword rests or luxurious surcoats worn over armor, are from Japanese museums, and nearly half are officially designated National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties by the Japanese. Many are exhibited only rarely in Japan, much less allowed to leave the country.
Due to their fragility, not all objects will be on view at once: about 60 will be rotated out of the show during the first week of December, to be replaced by similar objects of equal caliber. And some displays will be gone long before then. For example the battle-scarred 12th-century cavalry armor that greets viewers in the show’s first gallery will be on view for only two weeks. Visit early and often.
This exhibition is a once-in-a-lifetime event for children, war buffs and connoisseurs of all ages, even garden-variety art lovers and anyone still mystified about the source of Darth Vader’s black-on-black helmet and mask. But mainly it is a chance to grasp in irreducible visual terms the complex extremes of Japan’s traditional aesthetic values and, to some extent, its moral ones too.
The centers of most of the show’s galleries are given over to the stunningly ornate suits of armor topped by even more extravagant helmets and by face masks whose open-mouthed expressions seem locked in an eternal battle cry. Most Japanese armor is made of small scales of iron finished in gleaming lacquer and laced together with bands of brightly colored leather or woven silk. These ensembles qualify as multimedia art not only because they involve an array of ultra-refined crafts but because they embody the spirit of several Japanese art forms. Their jutting planes of tiles are architecture in miniature, and the curled flaps of certain helmets even introduce pagodalike curves. The grimacing masks are pure kabuki: combat as performance. And aspects of painting and sculpture abound. The scales’ lacing alone — which provides color, texture, pattern and flexibility — dazzles.
A samurai’s armor was, after his swords, his most prized possession, handed down through generations and depicted in paintings. One of the show’s most exceptional ensembles is an all-black suit that belonged to the 16th-century commander Honda Tadakatsu and is especially notable for the large, three-pronged deer-horn helmet. (The horns, a wonderful combination of artifice and naturalism, are shiny lacquer with tiny bumps.) It is flanked on one side by a 17th-century hanging scroll that shows Tadakatsu in full regalia, with the same giant rosary of wood beads covered in gold leaf slung across his chest. On the other side of the actual armor is a second version, complete with the horns, in black and orange, which the family had made for a child seven generations later.
One of the show’s high points is a large vitrine devoted to seven helmets, including one whose crest is a large gold praying mantis and another, covered with silver leaf and shaped like Mount Fuji. Judging from the pictures in the catalog, the helmets in the second rotation may be even more spectacular.
The unprecedented gathering of nearly 60 naked sword blades, which ring the walls of these galleries, almost forms a show in its own right, and combined with their labels the blades constitute a crash course in their connoisseurship. Dating primarily from the 11th to the 17th centuries, the blades would have been incorporated into a number of samurais swords, including the tachi (slung sword), katana (sword), uchigatana (mid-length sword) and tanto (dagger, which unusually figured in seppuku). Usually only samurai were officially permitted to wear two swords at once — for example, a katana and a tanto — both slipped through the warrior’s broad sash.
The blades have always been appreciated as art objects as much as weapons. Several swords here were honored by being named. Swordsmiths began to sign their blades — on the tang, or the end of the blade left rough and covered by the hilt — as early as the 11th century, and contrasting aesthetics of swordsmithing, handed down in families through generations, resulted in different schools, just as in Japanese painting.
Swords are appreciated for their elegant proportions, curved lines and the subtle surface textures, which have names like “tight wood grain,” “burl grain” and “pear skin.” (Magnifying glasses are recommended for the truly serious.) But the most interesting distinguishing characteristic is the hamon, or tempering line or pattern, an austere but purely decorative contrast in the tone of the metal extending along the blade. The hamon is created by applying clay slip of different densities to both sides of the blade just before it is quenched — dipped in water — at the end of the forging process. (One result is that blades have a front and a back.)
With this process the swordsmith creates a narrow but distinctive dark-light silhouette of two or even three contrasting tones of silvers or grays that are usually visible from different angles. (Good knees help.) Basically, the blades are pictorial slivers, minimalist blends of painting and calligraphy in miniature that, as is usually the case with Japanese visual culture, are linked to nature. Their suggestiveness and variety astound, evoking irregular waves, mounds, mist, cloves, clouds and horizon lines. It is quite a revelation to go through this show concentrating on the blades.
When you turn from the arms back to the armor, the gaudy noise can be shocking, as can the realization that you have been viewing as beautiful pictorial objects weapons designed to maim and kill with utmost precision.
But the blades can’t be used until they are encased in their own kind of gaudy armor — beautifully worked bronze sword guards, lacquer sheaths and elaborate hilts — that protect them and render them functional, but that are themselves pushed outrageously beyond function, providing some of the show’s richest, most compressed moments of extravagance. The hilts are covered in sharkskin and beautifully bound with crisscrossing silk cord beneath which you can glimpse bits of gold: finely worked figures, creatures and plant forms called menuki. Thus embedded, they were barely visible, but they improved the samurai’s grip on his weapon. Several are displayed ex-hilt, as it were, since they have long been collected in their own right, even by some of the samurai themselves.
“Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868” runs through Jan. 10 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
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