Natural Harmony

A Sensitivity to the Seasons

‘Persimmon Tree’ Painting by Sakai Hôitsu

‘Persimmon Tree’ by Sakai Hôitsu (1816)

Summer and Autumn in Japanese Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The idea that Japanese culture has a unique sensitivity to the seasons has been warped by repetition. It’s easy for Westerners to see a title such as the one for this show and imagine a room of hotel-wall pictures, delicate and meticulous—and utterly nonthreatening. The Met’s ads reinforce the cliché: Oh look, a branch of morning glories! How pretty!

But when you get up close, in person, those purple blossoms are more like an attack of morning glories. Suzuki Kiitsu’s 19th-century screen dominates one big wall of the exhibit. Huge royal-blue flowers seem to glow from within, on a gilt background whose negative space is as powerful as the fleshy flowers themselves. These are morning glories that look like they could eat small animals.

And while some of the show’s other artworks are graceful and quiet, even pretty, the curators have put together a show which looks at many of the shifting moods of nature, and human interactions with the natural world, to which we belong only uneasily.

“A Sensitivity to the Seasons” covers several centuries, and does not proceed in chronological order. It opens in the late 19th century, with Shibata Zeshin’s decorated black lacquered boxes, which bear images of summer and autumn fruits. These luminescent, highly stylized fruits seem to float in space: spare, stark, modern images which wouldn’t be out of place at an especially design-conscious casino. There’s no attempt at realism.