Circa 1950 Japanese Screen. Surrealist Nihon-ga Landscape.

About the Item

Anonymous Surrealist Landscape Showa era, circa 1950 Four-panel Japanese Screen, pigment on paper. A post World War 2 Japanese nihon-ga screen depicting a Surrealist landscape. The fantastical landscape is populated with tree-like limbs and forms within which countless eyes, faces and bodies have been created. Creating faces from unusual juxtapositions of objects has been a tendency in painting for hundreds of years though this work owes its inspiration to the western Surrealist movement of the mid-war period. The highly unconventional and seemingly bizarre imagery celebrates the power of the unconscious, depicting a scene and ideas that defy logical sense. The organic and biomorphic forms create an atmosphere deeply reminiscent of a dream. Although the screen is unsigned the highly emotional and experimental subject matter points to the Kyoto based Pan-real Art Association. Four-panel folding screens were a relatively common exhibition size canvas for the immediate post-war period and were often left unsigned. We haven’t been unable to unearth anything of the exhibition history relating to this particular screen, though it was certainly painted with exhibition in mind. The Pan-real Art Association was formed in 1948 and marked a sudden eruption of desire for subjective expression, suppressed during the war, following Japan's military defeat. The founding members, young individuals trained in nihon-ga at the Kyoto Municipal School of Painting, aimed to liberate the motifs in traditional Japanese nihon-ga and actively incorporate Western avant-garde expressions. Works from the very early Pan-real era reflect a significant influence of Surrealist painting, exhibiting fantastical and often mysterious qualities. The group was dedicated to pursuing reality in painting through experimental methods driven by intense internal emotion and expanding the possibilities of Japanese nihon-ga in terms of subject matter and materials. Another focus was on impasto layering of pigments, attempting to infuse nihon-ga with some of the qualities found in oil painting. In this particular work the pigments have been laid on the paper surface thickly enough that knife strokes or texture scratches are visible throughout.

Dimensions:

Height: 69 in (175.26 cm)Width: 109 in (276.86 cm)Depth: 0.75 in (1.91 cm)

Style:

Showa (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Paper,Hand-Painted

Place of Origin:

Japan

Period:

Mid-20th Century

Date of Manufacture:

Circa 1950