Sumptuous Robes from Japan

By ROBERT HUGHES

It is possible that there are textiles somewhere of a refinement and elaboration to rival the ones now on show at New York's Japan Society. Possible, but unlikely. The exhibition, 145 robes, masks and accessories made for the classical No theater by 17th and 18th century Japanese craftsmen, comes from the collection of a family which, next to the Emperor's, was for more than 250 years the most exalted in Japan--the Tokugawa. The shogun, or warlord, leyasu Tokugawa unified Japan at the beginning of the 17th century, welding its scattered feudal clans into a military ruling class with himself at the top; from then until the capsule of Japanese self-containment was ruptured by Admiral Perry, the country was run by an unbroken line of Tokugawa's descendants.

No family had a deeper effect, as patrons, on all the institutions of. Japanese culture from swordmaking to the tea ceremony. And the No theater, that elaborate and (to most non-Japanese) incomprehensibly subtle combination of masked mime, costume, song and dance, received its classical form under the Tokugawa aegis. The family collection, housed in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, is generally acknowledged to be the greatest private hoard of Japanese art in the world. In the area of No costumes, it is unsurpassable. The Japan Society show, which opened at Washington's National Gallery of Art in April and will travel to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in the summer, is therefore a unique event: most of these fragile and sumptuous robes have never been lent abroad before, and few are even seen inside Japan.

Transformed by Dignity. On the bare cypress-wood stage of the No theater, the actor's robe is both costume and set. Its stiff, voluminous folds, bulked out with padding and under-robes, suggest architecture. The actors move slowly--No acting is more remarkable for stateliness than agility --and the audience has time to inspect the details of a costume. (Nevertheless, the work represented in the Tokugawa collection can hardly have been fully appreciated onstage, any more than the craftsmanship of a medieval chasuble can be discerned from the church pews.) It follows that in No, costume has a different relationship to role and character from its usual one in the more "realist" forms of Western drama.

"The No as a traditional Japanese performing art," remarks the Tokugawa Museum's curator, Sadao Okochi, in the catalogue, "has been purified and transformed by the dignity of its costumes." The motifs of a robe's design establish the mood, the period and the place of the action. Thus--to a Japanese theatergoer who knew the rules--a costume like the karaori robe in russet silk (see color] would at once suggest a Heian-period court, somewhere between A.D. 800 and 1200. The balls, woven with exquisite precision in raised white silk, refer to a Heian court game called kemari, an aristocratic and pointless kind of football with no rules. The game consisted of several players kicking a bean-stuffed ball around a courtyard in which stood certain trees--cherry, maple, pine, bamboo and (here worked in gold thread into the red ground) willow.

Likewise, the extraordinary 17th century outer robe covered with woven brocade designs of autumnal grasses is intended (so the catalogue notes inform us) to convey the "melancholy, somewhat desolate mood" of "a lonely field at dusk." If this is melancholy, the mood was never more lyrically conveyed. The robe is an anthology of natural observation, with seven types of plants rendered in a marvelously clear, springy line, through gradations of color that result from the separate tinting, part by part, of each of the thousands of silk threads. Where the brown, gray and blue rectangles of the background meet, the threads are aligned slightly out of register, producing a shimmer of one color into another.

Such objects are, of course, at the opposite pole of sensibility from the ideas of wabi and sabi--"artless" simplicity, near-invisible interferences with nature -- which are the root of much Japanese art. These are court art, raised to an intimidating level of egotism: a feudal lord displayed his power and wealth in the costumes of his No troupe. Apart from the kind of tie-dyeing used for some kimonos, which took a year to tie and another year to unpick, these robes probably consumed more expert human labor than any other garments in history. The weavers might finish six inches of fabric in a week. The planning of the design, with its innumerable shifts of color and texture, must have required a degree of intelligent concentration unequaled in the history of Western weaving. That the robes have survived at all, through the vicissitudes of performance since the 17th century, is a small curatorial miracle; their pristine condition is a larger one. Nothing like them will ever be made again.

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