Summer Landscape, Hashimoto Kansetsu

Artwork Overview

Hashimoto Kansetsu, Summer Landscape
Hashimoto Kansetsu, Summer Landscape
Hashimoto Kansetsu
Summer Landscape
early 1900s, Meiji period (1868–1912)
Hashimoto Kansetsu, artist
1883–1945
Summer Landscape, early 1900s, Meiji period (1868–1912)
Where object was made: Japan
Material/technique: color; paper; ink
Credit line: Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Fund
Accession number: 1997.0374.01
Not on display
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Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label:
"Asian Gallery," Jul-2003, Youmi Efurd
Hashimoto Kansetsu was born in Kobe to a family of literati scholars who valued Chinese studies and practiced poetry, painting, and calligraphy. His father’s reputation as a scholar drew many visitors to the house-Chinese, Korean, and Western in addition to Japanese-so that Kansetsu was raised in an unusually cosmopolitan environment.
This pair of screens reflects his Nanga (Chinese literati tradition) style in the 1920s, a decade in which he was preoccupied with Chinese art. The landscape motifs and expressive brushwork of this set of screens reflect Kansetsu’s deep love for the China of his mind. At the same time, these paintings reveal his ability to look afresh at familiar themes as he draws on Western concepts of space to delineate form.

Archive Label 2003:
Hashimoto Kansetsu was born in Kobe to a family of literati scholars who valued Chinese studies and practiced poetry, painting, and calligraphy. His father’s reputation as a scholar drew many visitors to the house - Chinese, Korean and Western as well as Japanese - so that Kansetsu was raised in an unusually cosmopolitan environment. As an adult Kansetsu traveled widely, visiting China frequently and Europe twice. His work reflects these multiple influences.

Kansetsu brushed most of his nanga or literati style paintings such as Summer and Winter Landscapes in the 1920s, a decade in which he was preoccupied with Chinese art. The landscape motifs and expressive brushwork of this set of screens reflect Kansetsu’s deep love for the China of his mind. At the same time, these paintings reveal his ability to look afresh at familiar themes as he draws on Western concepts of space to delineate form.

Hashimoto Kansetsu was born fifteen years after the Meiji Restoration and died during the height of the U.S. bombing of Japan in 1945. He lived through the turbulence of Japan’s expansionist activities throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and his life and work reflected the complexities and contradictions of the period. He was at once a highly acclaimed painter and critic, a prosperous cosmopolitan, a scholar immersed in the study of ancient Chinese paintings, and a fervent nationalist who used his talents to support the war effort.

For centuries, Chinese scholars had painted and collected ink monochrome landscapes as a retreat from the harsh realities of political life. In the context of Hashimoto Kansetsu’s life and times, Summer and Winter Landscapes stands as an eloquent statement of belief, a pure landscape of the mind, in the midst of the harsh realities of war, propaganda, and political turmoil in early-twentieth-century Asia.

Exhibitions

Meiji: Japan's Transition into a Global Society
Alison Miller, curator
2007
Spencer Museum of Art 25th Anniversary Celebration
2003
Asian Gallery Rotation
Youmi Efurd, curator
2003

Resources

Audio

Didactic – Art Minute
Didactic – Art Minute
Episode 103 Apr-2007, Ai-lian Liu I'm David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. Hashimoto Kansetsu’s Summer Landscape and Winter Landscape are two large painted folding screens dating to 1911, toward the end of Japan’s Meiji period. Painted in ink and color on paper, the screens feature traditional motifs commonly found in nanga, or Japanese literati painting. In Summer Landscape, a ferryboat crosses the river in the rain, steering toward distant mountains shrouded in mist and clouds. Winter Landscape portrays a Buddhist monastery buried deep in snow-swept mountains, surrounded by trees and isolated by the blizzard from the outside world. In the painting’s lower left corner, a tantalizing trail leads into the mountains. For Hashimoto Kansetsu, a literati artist working in a time when the traditional values he cherished were fast disappearing, the distant mountains and secluded monastery likely symbolized refuge from the industrialized world. Amidst the modernization, political turmoil and war of the early twentieth century, these traditional landscape screens can best be understood as products of the artist’s imagination. With thanks to Ai-lian Liu for her text, from the Spencer Museum of Art, I'm David Cateforis.