A Bird's-Eye View

Few nations have made art so much a part of life as Japan. Everything from tea drinking to wrestling and archery has been given its place in the esthetic hierarchy. And at the summit are those art masterpieces deemed worthy of the title "national treasures." In fact, they are almost never allowed out of the country.

All of which makes the current exhibition of Japanese artworks, the most important to be sent overseas since World War II, an historic occasion. Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the $4,000,000 display of treasures is currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, winds up in April in Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. Among the 155 objects, including textiles, armor and ceramics, are some 22 mountain peaks of art, esthetically rare and historically telling, which have culminated trends or determined the artistic course in Japan for 4,500 years. Among the greatest (see color pages) never before seen in the U.S.:

P: The portrait of the traveling monk Zemmui, a member of the Tendai Buddhist sect, which ranks as a Japanese Giotto. It is a masterpiece of the 11th century, when the Fujiwara shoguns reigned, encouraging the arts as the Medicis did in Italy. The unknown artist profiles the Indian-born patriarch, a posture seldom used before, and gives him a Japanese face. As a light touch, the great priest's shoes appear below his chair, casually kicked off rather than neatly lined up to conform to Japanese etiquette. The picture is incredibly shallow spatially; the chair legs appear to be on a single plane, the monk's robe swirls from his back to his sleeves as if it were turning inside out. But this would not bother the Japanese; they used "bird's-eye" perspective--the farther up the picture plane the farther back in pictorial space the object.

P: Sotatsu's Waterfowls in Lotus Pond is also a kakemono, or hanging scroll, mounted on silk, that shows the development of Japanese art into the early 17th century. Its impressionistic look stems from the artist's technique, known as tarashikomi, the brushing on of successive tones of ink while the underlying ones are wet. Appropriately for "bird's-eye" perspective, the bird below may be smaller than the lotus blossoms above, but the viewer reads it as floating in the foreground.

P: During the 9th century, statues of healing Buddhas became popular. The 5-ft.-tall Yakushi Nyorai (see opposite page, center) is the most important survivor of the Gango-ji temple near Nara, once Japan's foremost city. Yet, for all the sanctity surrounding it, this Japanese statue is a bold departure from traditional Chinese elegance. In this Buddha's broad shoulders, strength replaces softness. Carved from a single block of cypress, the sculpture seems to derive its rippling drapery from the wood's grain.

Flanking the healing Buddha are two nearly lifesize, 13th century divinities from Kyoto's Hall of the Thirty-Three Bays, devoted to Senju Kannon, the 1,000-armed Goddess of Mercy. At left is Mawara-nyo depicted as an old woman; her original polychrome has been largely chipped away, but her rock-crystal eyes are as penetrating as ever. The feeble, cane-clutching Basusen (right), a companion Buddhist divinity, is a miracle of sculpture in the yosegi technique. Eighteen separate carvings in cypress make up his figure, including his detachable cap. His nonaristocratic features in marked contrast to Takanobu's classic 12th century portrait, The Emperor's Adviser, testify to the acceptance and popularity of Buddhism by the Japanese common folk in this period. The dignity that the chisel has revealed in the unpretty features rivals the nobility in the sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. Curiously, these Japanese treasures were made just one century earlier.

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