Textile Society of America
Date of this Version
2002
Document Type
Article
Citation
Published in Silk Roads, Other Roads: Textile Society of America 8th Biennial Symposium, Sept. 26–28, 2002, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
Abstract
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, recently acquired a remarkable group of over thirty-five Japanese textiles, the majority of which are probably pieces from kosode robes of the Edo period (1615-1868). This paper will serve as a brief introduction to the collection, which will be on view next summer in the Museum's Japanese galleries.
This introduction to the recent acquisition consists of three parts. The first part discusses a few of the pieces from the recently acquired group that have companions in the Nomura collection of the National Museum of Japanese History (Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan) in Sakura, Chiba, Japan. The second part presents two of the earliest pieces in the group, one in comparison with a similar design in a kosode order book, and the other with special attention to technique. The final part focuses on early examples of the yuzen technique.
Comparisons with the Nomura Collection
Several of the fragments in the collection correspond to textiles used in the kosode screens of Nomura Shojiro's famous collection, which is in the National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura, Chiba prefecture, Japan. Nomura Shqjiro (1879-1943) was a dealer in Japanese art of all types and a collector and connoisseur of Japanese textiles. He had an almost incalculable influence on the collecting of Japanese textiles, especially in this country, where museum collections from Los Angeles to New York benefited from patrons who had purchased textiles from him. In the early twentieth century, as Japanese textile collections were being sold, Nomura acquired fine robes and fragments of robes dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Many of the garments were no longer complete, having been cut up into pieces for various purposes—perhaps for religious use, perhaps for mounting paintings, perhaps for other uses. Patiently, Nomura gathered fragments and slowly reassembled kosode. In one hundred instances where he could not recreate a complete garment, he hit upon the idea of making kosode screens in which the robe fragments were pasted to Japanese screens in the form of complete kosode hanging on robe racks. The kosode screens echoed a Japanese tradition of painted screens depicting robes on robe racks; however. Nomura's screens were not painted but made from actual kosode fragments.
Comments
Copyright 2002 by the author(s). Used by permission of TSA.