Tigers in Japanese Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum

Saturday, 09 June 2007 21:04

Saint Louis, MO - The Saint Louis Art Museum announces the June 29 opening of Untamed Beauty: Tigers in Japanese Art, a spectacular collection of 18 paintings and two woodblock prints dating from the 16th through 20th centuries. As tigers are not indigenous to Japan, their absence spurred fanciful ideas about their nature and physical form. The idea of giant, powerful cats so captivated Japanese imaginations that they produced innumerable paintings of them over the course of their history, most without the benefit of firsthand observation. Some of the earliest images were painted by traveling monks who returned from China, where tigers were abundant, with paintings by Chinese artists.

Like the Chinese, Japanese artists skillfully rendered the tiger’s physical appearance but also sought to convey something of the tiger’s mood or spirit by placing it in specific contexts. Artists Kano Tsunenobu and Katayama Yokoku both rendered tigers emerging from bamboo, a symbol of strength, while Kano Tanshin depicted them fording streams.

According to traditional Asian mythology, tigers are identified with the female principle yin, as well as with autumn, wind and the west. Artists often paired them with dragons, a creature identified with the male principle yang, as seen in a pair of hanging scrolls by Kishi Ganku and Kishi Renzan. Together the two images represent opposite principles in nature.

During the latter part of the Edo period (1615–1868), Western books on anatomy, botany and zoology entered Japan through trade with foreign merchants, inspiring artists to systematically record their observations of the natural world. Because Japanese artists traditionally learned to paint by copying their designs or by emulating the works of famous masters, sketching directly from life was a revolutionary idea.

Exposure to Western artistic techniques and the opportunity to observe actual animals imported to Japan prompted painters to create images that demonstrated a new realism in the 19th century. Kishi Chikudo captured the sinuous power of large cats and imbued his tigers with a nobility and self-assurance appropriate to Asia’s “king of beasts”.

The exhibition features works from the collection of Harriet and Edson Spencer. Born in the “year of the tiger”, Edson Spencer purchased his first tiger painting in 1978, after he lived in Japan as Honeywell’s Far East regional manager in the early 1960s. He and his wife continue to collect art and are pleased to share their collection with the public.

Curated in St. Louis by Philip Hu, associate curator of Asian art, Untamed Beauty: Tigers in Japanese Art will be on view in Cohen Gallery (313) through September 9, 2007. The exhibition is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where it was first presented in 2005. Matthew Welch, curator of Japanese and Korean art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, served as organizing curator.

The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections that include works of art of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strengths in 20th-century German art. The Art Museum offers a full range of exhibitions and educational programming generated independently and in collaboration with local, national, and international partners. Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free to all every day; featured exhibition admission is free on Fridays. For more information about the Saint Louis Art Museum, call 314.721.0072 or visit www.slam.org.