“What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!”
—Bertolt Brecht
The Aesthetics of
Summer and Autumn,
a show at the Nezu Museum, Tokyo,
Sept 14, 2024–Oct 20, 2024.
The first imperial anthology of poetry in Japan, compiled in 905 A.D. at the emperor’s request, contained two books about spring and two about autumn. Summer and winter were given one book each. A later collection, the Shinsen Waka, included a hundred and twenty poems in the section on “Spring and Autumn” and forty on “Summer and Winter.” Painters, too, long preferred the milder seasons, and they tended to pair them in the manner of that second collection. They painted many screens that set cherry blossoms alongside autumn foliage.
These are the bare facts that inspired a recent show at Tokyo’s Nezu Museum. With a dryness that amused me, the curators cited the anthologies and described Japanese art’s “bias in favor of spring and autumn… While this tradition was carried on, in Edo-period art, the combination of summer and autumn, instead of spring and autumn, is also striking.” It seemed to me hardly enough occasion for a show, or else there was a different sense of what constituted interest in Japan. How could the juxtaposition of two seasons that followed in natural sequence be “striking”?
Before arriving in Tokyo, I had worked for several months at a large American museum. I helped edit the exhibition catalogue for a highly political show, and I reviewed labels for their compliance with certain rules of style and “inclusive language.” Politics, if it had not changed the direction of the museum, had come to suffuse the official rhetoric. I kept waiting, then, as I read the Nezu Museum’s paragraphs about summer and autumn, for the turn to climate change, the moment when the seasons would be revealed in a more sinister aspect. I expected a justifying theme. But this was the show: the less famous, semi-neglected pairing of summer and autumn. The two seasons would be considered for their own sakes, in their interplay and essence. The museum was inviting us to direct contemplation, to look at summer and autumn not as a way of understanding something else, but just those two things.
The plainly named “Aesthetics of Summer and Autumn” is a rich, two-room show, with some small objects—sets of lily-shaped dishes for summer, a spiderwebbed stationery box for autumn—in glass cases that let us “rest the eyes.” The principal works are the large screens in each room, accompanied by many elegant hanging scrolls, their ties falling forward like bangs. They appear largely as couples: pairs of hanging scrolls, pairs of folding screens. Sometimes a pair traverses the seasons, sliding smoothly or jumping abruptly from summer to fall, depending on the artist’s vision. Others are diptychs for a single season. The curators have arranged the works in a progression of time, based on the flora, fauna, or tone of each: “Summer Arrives,” “Midsummer Mood,” “From Summer to Autumn,” “Autumn Cool Begins,” and “Autumn Grasses.” In-season creatures populate the different painted worlds. The cuckoo heralds summer in Japan; the bat, a symbol of good fortune, is summertime itself.
The finer splitting of the show, the sorting of works not into summer and autumn but into smaller categories, is a reminder that the four seasons are only accepted clichés. Time could be divided otherwise. One has, along with the solstice and equinox, the behavior of animals, particular changes of weather, the winds, fresh blooms, gradual fadings. “The year has many seasons more than are recognized in the almanac,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his Journal. “There is that time about the first of June, the beginning of summer, when the buttercups blossom in the now luxuriant grass and I am first reminded of mowing and of the dairy. Every one will have observed different epochs.”
There is pleasure in the seasons we devise for ourselves, and there is a different pleasure in the ritual of common symbols: the purple crocus that spells the end of winter, the birdsongs that return in spring. In Japanese art, white lilies have come to bear the standard of summer. They appear at the Nezu in two works from the Rimpa School, an Edo-period movement that produced beautiful, gold-foil screens. Summer Flowers, a pair of two-panel screens by Ogata Korin, from the eighteenth century, shows a cascade of flowers observed with botanical precision. There are a few white lilies, their stamens pointing through the petals, ensconced among the other flowers. A century later, Suzuki Kiitsu painted those lilies almost comically large, without much regard for science, in the river-wide Mountain Streams in Summer and Autumn. From Korin to Kiitsu it is possible to see the coalescing of a tradition, how the seasons get their markers, the beloved things people can watch for, wait for, and understand as signs.
Through art, the seasons become international: those signs and markers travel. Snow stands for winter in places where snow almost never falls. The works in the Nezu show attest to a medley of close observation and imported sensibilities. A few of Korin’s Summer Flowers had been brought from the South of Japan; one work, in the show’s autumn section, is not Japanese at all, but comes from China. The seasons get imported, exported: as Teju Cole writes, “Spring, even in America, is Japanese.”
In my case this was literally true. I grew up outside Washington, D.C., where spring meant the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Every year, my mother entered the annual lottery to run a ten-mile race that passed around the Tidal Basin and coincided with the bloom. My friends went downtown to take pictures with the soft pink flowers. The trees, thousands of them, were gifts from Japan. Their annual blossoming confirms an amity and proves that time is still in joint.
But more often it is a failure of seeing, this definition of the seasons from elsewhere. We miss our own harvest, thinking of Vermont’s red and orange leaves. Kiitsu’s Mountain Streams in Summer and Autumn, even with its too-large lilies, fulfills the task of noting the local world more carefully. It consists of a pair of wide, six-panel screens. One panel is summer; the other, autumn. A simple, stylized stream flows through the green mountains, among lichen-spotted rocks and trees. The stream continues into the next screen, crossing the synapse between the final panels. They line up at the edges, gold foil to gold foil, green to green. From summer to autumn, the green changes just slightly, a step toward fading. The cypress trees start to brown from the base of their branches. One deciduous tree has lost almost all its leaves. But the lichens go on, steadily, like a polka dot spray for both seasons.
Autumn does not come all at once: that is what Kiitsu has seen. Some trees hold their leaves when others are already naked, a more various and charming state of autumn than the common “blaze” in pictures. In my own neighborhood, I watch the gingko trees change at irregular rates. On a single block, there are several trees of the same species, with the same conditions of soil and light, but some examples prove more eagerly caducous than the rest. A few trees are almost fully yellow while their brethren stay green.
Everywhere in Tokyo there were attempts to match the season. On the upper floor of the Nezu, specific tea bowls were brought out for the end of the tea year, which would finish ritually with October. The Tokyo National Museum had rotated the kimonos on display to mark the change to autumn. And down the street from the Nezu, the Yamatane Museum would soon close its exhibition on “Higashiyama Kaii and Summer in Japan.”
In one painting at the Yamatane’s show, a woman’s attention was caught by a firefly. In the Nezu’s summer section, a hanging scroll showed a child fanning himself in a pavilion. I felt transported by these little gestures, which were so familiar to me. I could step into the paintings. The child’s fan, a stick with an oval at the end, was longer than the handheld fans I had seen all over Asia, but no different in principle. One of Hiroshige’s woodblock prints at the Yamatane showed people caught by a sudden shower of rain: three friends, perhaps, trying to stay dry under one umbrella, someone’s hat flying off in the wind. The paintings were very close to us: my sister and I had sweated on our walk to the Yamatane, and afterward I fanned her with the museum brochure. And yet the works were so far from us: hundreds of years away, in the Edo period. There was the simultaneous sensation of anachronism and timeliness.
Van Gogh painted a copy of that windswept Hiroshige print. I was reminded of him, in another confusion of time, when I looked again at a section of Korin’s Summer Flowers, the early Rimpa screen in the Nezu show. The irises are stark. They are at the bottom of the work, perhaps hiding a little. They are imposters, spring-blooming, not summer flowers at all. I think Korin could not give them up. The flowers’ dark blue against the gold is irresistible; the blue is as rich as the gold; and the petals are beguiling, alien in structure, with such width at the center and such a thin connecting point that they should be made of metal. Korin is famous for his irises. The Nezu has a larger work by him, declared a National Treasure, that consists solely of this one flower repeating across a pair of six-panel screens. The museum brings the screens out each spring, from mid-April to mid-May, when real irises bloom in the garden.
There are histories to be unearthed, always. My vision was trained for that, well before I had begun working at a museum. I wondered about the Nezu’s funding. I read it came from a railroad fortune, which could not have been entirely clean, given the years of empire. And what about the cherry blossoms I loved in Washington? The first shipment of two thousand trees had been arranged by First Lady Helen Herron Taft, in 1909. “Mrs. Taft had lived in Japan,” the National Park Service says, “and was familiar with the beauty of the flowering cherry trees.” This is an evasion. She had not lived in Japan just by some interesting chance. Her husband, William Howard Taft, had brought her there, while he was working as the United States Secretary of War. In his official capacity, he made the Taft–Katsura Agreement, confirming the American policy that allowed Japan to dominate and terrorize Korea. Japan, in turn, agreed not to interfere with America in the Philippines. Helen Herron Taft and William Howard Taft had lived in the Philippines, too. He served as colonial Governor-General there. The cherry trees were selected to represent different parts of the Japanese Empire. Soon enough, that empire would conquer the Philippines anyways. This was the kind of label I would have written, I knew, for an American exhibition. I would question the cherry blossoms. But was it possible, I wondered, to contemplate those histories, and still see the seasons for what they were?
After I had gone through the Nezu show, I walked around the museum’s small, careful garden. The grass had dried out in the heat. It had been mowed close to the ground; it was yellow in parts and flat. Two orange dragonflies buzzed around in what was otherwise perfect stillness, guarded by a tenth-century Buddhist pagoda. The dragonflies left shadows of their fuselages on the ground. I watched them for some time, as they hovered and then swerved onward, their movements incomprehensible to me, making complex, efficient paths in the air.
I went in to say goodbye to the woman who had welcomed me to the museum on a preview day, thanking her for some points of guidance. I told her about the pretty dragonflies in the garden. “Yes,” she said, and added, with the perfection of constrained interest: “It’s the season.”
Matthew Zipf is a Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His last piece for Threepenny was about Peter Hujar.
