Heaven-Opening View

Eighteen thousand Japanese, buzzing with admiration, visited Tokyo's National Museum last week to see the work of an artist who died 450 years ago. Known by his painter name, "Sesshu" (Snow Boat), he is today rated as Japan's greatest landscape artist; his works are valued at up to $250,000 each, and four are classed as "national treasures." So enthusiastic were the crowds that turned out to inspect the 30 Sesshu masterpieces on view that the museum broke precedent, was open on Mondays for the first time since its opening in 1937.

To Japanese, Sesshu is, as one early critic said, "the open door through which all contemporary and subsequent artists looked into the seventh heaven of Chinese genius." Working mainly in sumi ink and brush, Sesshu changed the Chinese art of landscape into something typically Japanese, portraying traditional Japanese scenes in sure, strong brush strokes that gave a new vigor and vision to the exquisite lines of the Chinese Sung period. From Sesshu onward, Japanese painting had a look of its own and a tradition still practiced by such modern masters as Taikwan Yokohama (TIME, Sept. 19).

Peace in Cloud Valley. Born in the small farming hamlet of Akahama in 1420, young Oda Toyo entered a Zen Buddhist temple at twelve. According to popular legend, he was a wayward boy, overfond of drawing. Tied to a wooden pillar as corrective discipline, he at first wept copiously, says legend, stopping only when his tears made a pool on the floor which he used as ink, with his toes for brushes. Oda Toyo's talent was early recognized and fostered, including apprenticeship to the painter Shubun, the leading practitioner of Chinese-style paintings of his day. Not until he was 44, disciplined in hand and heart, did Oda Toyo settle down to draw in a peaceful retreat in Unkoku (Cloud Valley), near Yamaguchi, soon began signing his work Sesshu.

Sesshu made firsthand contact with the sources of traditional landscape art during a trip to China as commercial emissary for a Japanese warlord. Once there, he studied in Zen Buddhist monasteries, turned out landscape drawings of the four seasons that amazed even the traditional classic practitioners. At Peking, he left behind one of his paintings, which for years was held up to young Chinese painters as a model of excellence. But Sesshu returned to Japan a disappointed man, noting that he had sought in vain through 400 provinces for a master, and concluded: "My only teachers of painting are the celebrated places of Ming--the mountains, rivers, grasses and trees . . . The teacher is in myself."

Pavilion with a View. Once at home again, Sesshu turned down the position of court painter to devote the rest of his life to painting in his Cloud Valley retreat and wandering through northern Kyushu, building landscape gardens, writing verse, and painting. When he happened on a particularly striking landscape, he built a "Pavilion of Heaven-Opening Picture," lingered there until he had exhausted the view.

During this period he turned out his greatest masterpiece, a 55-ft.-long scroll showing a panoramic view of valleys, lakes, mist-shrouded mountains and sturdy, small fishing villages. With old age his style changed once again. At 76 he turned out his famed Haboku Sansui, or ink-splashed landscape, setting down on wet paper in a few bold strokes an inn with wine flag, small boat with figures and a suggestion of distant mountains that for controlled mastery are unmatched in Japanese art.

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