The Faces of Asia

John Haber
in New York City

Hiroshige, Takashi Murakami, and Edo

Indian Skies: The Hodgkin Collection

When Utagawa Hiroshige named his prints 100 Famous Views of Edo, he could have been describing the many faces of a modern city. A lifelong resident of Edo, in Japan, he could see it changing beneath his feet and always came back for more. A New Yorker would know the feeling even today. You can tally the precious gains and losses in the course of a lifetime, from favorite haunts to entire neighborhoods.

Hiroshige, though, seems to have felt only the pleasures, and he took equal joy in seeking them out, from 1856 to 1858. A map at the Brooklyn Museum marks the spot of each and every print, and they cover the city. Their scope and density are impressive indeed for a city still on the brink of modernity, and so is his ever-shifting point of view. He juxtaposes nature and culture, change and tradition—and not even their clash can disturb the stillness. Some of the handmade impressions have vanished or faded, but the museum has a fine complete set, and it is on display for the first time in twenty-four years. One can walk alongside it, on all four walls of a large room, to share in their continued discoveries and the silence.

It has company as well. The museum asked a popular contemporary artist, Takashi Murakami, if he had on hand a response to the city—or would like to make one. Yes to both, and he has contributed not just one painting, but several, as tall or taller than he. Their size alone pulls Hiroshige into present. And then, as he always does, Murakami got carried away by his subject and his own facility. In a matter of months he created a complete series after the original.

Further into Asia and across centuries, India today is divided by religion, geography, and class—and united by little more than its divisions. Yet it has had a distinguished tradition—and a long, extended moment of royal grandeur in its art. The Howard Hodgkin collection at the Met lingers over centuries of Indian court painting, with an eye toward nature but a special fondness for its artifice and its rituals. Even flowers seem at a certain remove, filtered by memory and designed to impress the dynasties that cultivated them. Could Hodgkin, the British artist, still have the delights of observation and artifice, not to mention elephants? In the show's title, they all rest under vast "Indian Skies."

Stillness and change

Hiroshige (and no one calls him anything else) was not the first to title a work Famous Views. Kitao Shigemasa, for one, had adopted it in 1770, and it had already come to stand for a genre as well as a boast. And Hiroshige's series quickly earned its name. By the time he was done, it had grown to well over a hundred views in the face of demand, which also drove the multiple impressions. It found itself at the center of Japanese tradition, and no wonder. He rendered Edo day and night, in all weathers, and in every season, with an eye on both past and future.

Cities everywhere were changing fast, as urban economies brought expansion and commercialization. Hiroshige includes wood beams and towers as signs of construction. He moves easily between distant mountains and streets lined with stores and the craft that fed them, along with window-shoppers. The museum recreates a storefront in the center of the room. It was a low-rise city all the same. Towers tilt precariously and streets curve gently, with modern bustle and old-world charm.

Then, too, Edo had its own drivers of change. It had been growing for at least two centuries, but now feudal lords and shoguns had taken over. Samurai, their private armies, make a point of their discipline in close procession. Tourists showed up, too, for picnics, antiquity, and shopping. This was no longer a rural backwater, although it sits beside waters with views of a temple and its pagoda. Just ten years after this series of prints, the emperor moved in as well, and the city became Tokyo.

Hiroshige's prints run in no particular order, although he dates every one. Rather, he keeps the emphasis on discovery and variety. The simplest compositions proceed step by step into depth, marked by people, terraces, a herd of deer, more distant isles, mountains, and sky. Increasingly, though, he plays against expectations. The foreground cuts off architecture, leaving nowhere to stand. A ferry rider's hands rest on a rail, but what he sees may or may not match what you see.

He is playing with scale and point of view. A cat sits on a sill, looking out along with you, but with the better view. A kite or bird seems way larger than life as it swoops down and into the picture plane. He plays, too, with strong color and gentle gradations. Wood blocks all but demand uniform colors, but not for him—from the intensity of sunset to boxes for each work's title. If Japanese art makes you think of the monochrome of Chinese calligraphy and screens, think again.

A changing light adds still greater variety and drama. Tiny stars fill the night sky, and newly fallen show brightens the day. Sheets of rain in parallel streaks further define the picture plain and dare you to penetrate. And still the mood is peace. The exhibition opened just as cherry trees blossomed outside the museum. One banner shifts in the breeze, but others do not, and the cat lies still.

Flattening Edo

I began with the changing city, because the museum does. The curator, Joan Cummins, makes a point of it, with wall text and a map, rather than changing colors, line, and light. Despite herself, though, she sticks to tradition. An opening room introduces Hiroshige and pairs one print apiece by him and Shigemasa, but then the show moves on. (The older artist has a scratchier line, greater detail, less poetry and humor, and little color.) It saves Takashi Murakami for last.

Separate rooms for the two principal artists do not interrupt the flow of a series. It is up to you to compare and to contrast. Still, a small room between the two brings Tokyo into the present. In photographs by Alex Falcón Bieno, shops have become skyscrapers, and an elevated train follows the curve of a street. They look familiar from Hiroshige all the same. He is still the traditionalist and the visionary.

Had he visited the West, he would have had adjustments to make, ever the urban explorer. I can imagine him in Paris, heading up the Seine with Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to be sure that he had seen it all—and that brings one to Murakami. He speaks of Renoir and Vincent van Gogh as influences. Does he really need to reach Hiroshige by way of Paris, and can he? A more obvious influence is Pop Art. Surprisingly, it may add to his respect for the past.

Perhaps it must, if you associate Pop Art with Andy Warhol and quotation. And Murakami takes quotation seriously. So much for the originality of the avant-garde. I kept waiting for modern Japan or Mickey Mouse to drop into his "famous views," but they never do. You may struggle to figure out what, if anything, has changed between one series and the next. But then, if Warhol is right, what can change?

For one thing, painted views have become larger, and the series in full fills its single wall in three tight rows. At the same time, they have become flatter, as has to happen in blowing them up to poster size. They look all the brighter for that. They also call attention to the older artist's attachment to the picture plane. Did Hiroshige allow a tree branch to loop over itself? With Murakami, the closed loop is that much harder to miss.

The flatter colors echo Pop Art, of course, along with the current fashion for anime and cartoons. The sheer pace of his work may make him sound glib, and so he is. There is nothing like Hiroshige for his stillness and humor. Will Murakami's Edo ever be a famous view? Can quotation alone serve for the vitality of a changing city? Should Hiroshige vanish again for another twenty-four years, for preservation, it may have to do.

Courting India

India is the world's most populous country, crammed into the seventh largest by area, much of it in poverty for all its reputation in technology. And its prime minister is determined to exploit its hatreds and divisions in the interest of raw power, much like a certain right-wing leader in the United States. Hodgkin's collection itself spans four royal courts and geographical divisions from north to south and plains to the Himalayas. Yet all four keep returning to a just a few themes and comparable styles. You might find Mughal faces more subtly shaded and Deccan flatness more tempered by color, Rajput and Pahari art more crowded and colorful still, but you might still struggle to tell them apart.

Successive invaders only added to its conflicts and traditions. As the show begins, around 1600, Persia has retreated from its hopes for conquest, and Hindu gods and godesses return often in the work, but one can still see the influence of Islamic art in a taste for patterns and anecdotal detail. By the show's end, after 1900, the British empire has reduced the last maharajas to figureheads, and the Indian court along with court painting is coming to an end, too. In between, trade is bringing European painting to the mix as well, and it shows. For all its breadth, Hodgkin's collection centers on the early 1700s, and its totality parallels what Europe called the Baroque. If it is also an art of flattery and conformity, the late Baroque had its academicism, too.

One may turn to non-Western art for its antiquity, like Cycladic art at the Met now, and the sheer length of its history, like recent shows there of Buddhist art and "Africa and Byzantium." One may turn, too, to Asian art for its sense of timelessness, scholarship, and solitude, and indeed a rehanging to bring out poetry in Chinese art opened just days before "Indian Skies." India here, in contrast, is a recognizably modern world. It is a hyperactive world as well. Themes run to wedding processions and hunting, where each figure has its own story. That and profile portraits, with a bearded chin jutting forward because this ruler is in command.

The show opens in the middle. Two dynasties have the room to the left, the remaining two to the right. Chronology is out of the question, but it would be hard to discern anyway. Hodgkin, who died in 2017, is unavailable as curator, but John Guy and Navina Najat Haidar devote the central room to him and, sure enough, the elephants. They accommodate royal riders while reducing them to nearly comic proportions. And the elephants, too, keep busy, on a rampage or joining in the hunt.

Museum-goers are used by now to shows of private collectors, flattering a potential donor while leaving the collector absent in all but name. Hodgkin, though, was a painter not so easy to forget, and the show's nominal beginning includes two of his paintings, one titled Small Indian Sky. You may know his abstractions in oil for their wide, thick frames that both contain and accommodate the paint. What interested him in India is less clear. He must have liked the wild surfaces, articulating depth within flatness like Modernism itself. A limited palette and touches of bold may have reminded him of his own bright primaries, but I can see a closer parallel only in a single and very exceptional Indian painting that veers onto a field of tart yellow.

This is not a history of Indian art, and those new to that history may still have questions. I hesitate to display my ignorance by writing. Still, it has that marvelous collision between stasis and cultural divisions. Chinese and Western art appear in the flowers, but with a scratchy shorthand rather than elegant calligraphy of the first or the translucent brightness of the second in flowers from Flemish still life to Claude Monet and Georgia O'Keeffe. Intense reds in crowd scenes interrupt the muter colors of opaque watercolor. They bring nature itself to court.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Hiroshige's "100 Famous Views of Edo" with Takashi Murakami ran at The Brooklyn Museum through August 4, 2024, "Indian Skies" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 9.