NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

sits, especially for its second rotation, starting
Feb. 8, when, due to fragility, several hand scro
lls will be wound to different scenes and five scr
eens will be replaced by others.
The show contains more than 100 works that span mo
stly from the 13th to the 19th centuries. At its c
ore are some 20 hand scrolls, or emaki, an ingenio
us medium evolved from the illustrated sutras that
began landing in Japan from China in the eighth c
entury as part of the spread of Buddhism. While fu
ll of wonderfully observed natural details, Japane
se hand scrolls, unlike their Chinese precedents,
developed less as vehicles for pure landscape than
as stages on which to unfurl human dramas of all
kinds, in something like real time and space. In t
he hands of Japanese artists the scrolls were tant
amount to primitive films. Their fluidity, emotion
al expressiveness and sense of action and lived ex
perience give them an uncannily contemporary immediacy.
This is established at the start of the show with
a masterpiece: the five scrolls known as the "Illu
strated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine," a su
blime example of Chinese-style ink painting highli
ghted with translucent washes of color from the 13
th-century Kamakura period. Acquired in 1925, thes
e scrolls constitute one of the Met’s great painti
ngs, but they have never been exhibited together b
efore, and this alone makes "Storytelling in Japan
ese Art" a must-see.
With seductive intimacy the scrolls recount the li
fe and turbulent afterlife of Sugawara Michizane,
a ninth-century poet-statesman said to have died o
f a broken heart after being unjustly slandered. T
he tale includes the destruction unleashed by his
angry spirit (floods, fire, shattered buildings, s
ome of it delivered by a magnificent black-clad th
under god) and the dangerous journey to hell and b
ack by Nichizo, an intrepid acolyte sent to divine
how to placate Michizane. (It takes a temple.)