Notes on Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush

Ike Taiga (born in 1723), an 18^{th}-century painter and calligrapher, is often compared to Pablo Picasso for his dazzling range, almost ferocious vitality, and constant experimentation throughout his career.
This exhibition, the first major survey of Taiga’s work in the United States, features nearly 200 works spanning four decades, vividly conveying his artistic trajectory from child prodigy to central figure.
Taiga was an innovative proponent of nanga painting, a style patterned after the self-taught literati painters of southern China, almost always depicting landscapes. He also distinguished himself as a synthesizer of Japanese traditions.
The exhibition was organized by Felice Fischer, the Philadelphia Museum’s longtime curator of Japanese art, and Kyoko Kinoshita, assistant curator, and includes significant loans from Japanese museums, some designated as national treasures.
An excellent and hefty catalog accompanies the exhibition, offering extensive details about Taiga and Gyokuran's lives.

Taiga was exceptionally erudite, well-versed in Chinese painting and poetry (especially Ming and Qing dynasties literati), familiar with official Japanese art schools, and deeply influenced by Neo-Confucian thought, Daoism, and Buddhism.
Despite his erudition, he was not an aesthete; his work often possesses a visceral directness.
He infused his copies of Chinese landscape paintings with a sense of reality derived from extensive travels through Japan, including climbing mountains to gain new perspectives.
Extremely productive, Taiga worked effortlessly, shifting styles and scales, creating pieces that were dense and spare, raw and refined, always with irrepressible assurance and a sense of humor.
The exhibition showcases his versatility, from a sheet of calligraphy made at age 11 to hanging scrolls painted in his teens, including astoundingly adroit works created with his fingertips and fingernails.
His diverse body of work includes painted screens, fans, hand scrolls, calligraphy in various forms and sizes, Japanese sumi ink painting, and his distinct Chinese-style landscape paintings.
His Chinese-style landscape painting reached its zenith in several series of hanging scrolls that depict the seasons month by month.
Like his Chinese predecessors, Taiga also published painting manuals that were utilized for generations.

Taiga's profound accomplishments are underscored by the fact that he lived only to be 53. His renown was such that his works were forged even before his death.
He was married to Tokuyama Gyokuran (born around 1728), an accomplished calligrapher, poet, and painter in her own right.
They shared a small, cluttered studio and led a proto-Bohemian existence, centered on art, economically straitened, yet culturally rich. Both were celebrated artists, particularly in Japan.
While not a joint retrospective, the exhibition "Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush" includes a notable number of Gyokuran's works and several collaborations between the couple.
The catalog suggests a potentially more balanced presentation could have included additional works by Gyokuran.
They engaged in stylistic give-and-take: Taiga taught Gyokuran painting, while she expanded his knowledge of Japanese poetry and calligraphy, which manifested in haiga.
Haiga is a uniquely Japanese integration of script and imagery, exemplified by Taiga’s “Man Eating Sweet Potatoes,” where calligraphy dances above the subject, expressing the joy of eating. Gyokuran's fans, like one depicting islands through a delicate scrim, also illustrate this.

Both Taiga and Gyokuran were from relatively humble backgrounds and raised by strong, far-sighted mothers.
Taiga's father, a farmer who worked in a silver mint in Kyoto, died when Taiga was 3. His mother ensured his exceptionally thorough education.
By age 11, Taiga was proficient in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, impressing priests at the Mampuku-ji Zen temple in Kyoto.
He began studying painting in his teens and opened a shop selling his painted fans.
During this period, the Tokugawa shogunate was extending the teaching of Chinese Neo-Confucian thought and calligraphy to solidify its power, which greatly influenced education.
Gyokuran, born out of wedlock, was believed to be the daughter of a samurai. She was raised by her mother Yuri and grandmother Kaji, both respected waka poets who operated a popular tea shop.
Her mother, Yuri, might have chosen Taiga as her husband, or the match could have been arranged by Yanagisawa Kien, a noted artist with whom both Taiga and Gyokuran studied.

The exhibition highlights two primary themes:
1. Deeply Spiritual Reverence for Nature: This is fundamental to much Japanese art, especially the nanga style.
2. The Significance of Ink: The exhibition profoundly explores how Japanese artists expanded ink into a magnificently expressive medium, capable of rendering panoramic landscapes or intimate haiga, and always conveying the artist's unique gesture and personality.

Unlike the Chinese literati, who were often court officials painting for leisure, Taiga and Gyokuran departed from this amateur status.
The couple struggled throughout their lives to support themselves, working for temples and private patrons, and occasionally selling smaller pieces from their cramped studio.
Their listing in the first Who's Who in Kyoto in 1768, complete with their address, shows their public recognition, though drop-in visitors sometimes irritated Taiga.

The exhibition features dramatic stylistic shifts, such as a series of five works where Taiga alternates enlarged, brusque calligraphic flourishes on two hanging scrolls with three scrolls depicting bamboo in similarly broad, controlled strokes.
The second half of the show emphasizes Taiga’s Chinese-style landscapes, which, while catering to patrons' desires, exhibit a new pictorial vitality and unity.
A highlight is the reunion of 8 of 12 hanging scrolls depicting the months of the year, each executed in different styles and brush techniques.
The exhibition concludes with a serene yet majestic fade-out in the final gallery, featuring a wall of shadowy, wonderfully awkward late works on silk.

The Philadelphia Museum's effort transcends individual artists, expanding understanding of the profound melding of indigenous and outside influences fundamental to Japanese art.
The exhibition, “Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush,” was on view through July 22 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, located at Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26^{th} Street.