One of the major formats in the history of Japanese painting are the byobu-e, screens on which scenes are often pictured. These screens are free-standing, portable, usually come in pairs, can serve as divider or background and have been popular since as early as the Nara period (710-794).
Among the many different kinds of picture such screens hold is the interesting category of city pictures. There are many examples of Edo's being pictured on screens and there are at least 100 examples of the rakuchu rakugai zu, folding-screen paintings depicting the city of Kyoto. It is these that are examined, described, and pictured in this scholarly and interesting account of their practical uses, aesthetic claims and political purposes.
Almost without exception, Kyoto screens are conceived as pairs and are folded, usually, into six panels each. Every screen presents the city and its surrounding in different aerial perspectives. The urban spaces are in the lower half of each screen, and the outskirts serve as background for the upper half. Kyoto's grid plan is depicted by setting east-west streets on parallel diagonals and north-south streets on parallel horizontals. All the screens employ gold, usually in form of cloud patterns, and most are enlivened by the depiction of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of figures of the inhabitants.
In addition, the passage of the seasons is added as temporal dimension. The seasons pass at regular intervals of roughly three panels each. In addition most of the painters adhere to the venerable geomantic associations of the four seasons with the four cardinal directions. The months of winter appear in the north, spring in the east, summer in the southwest and autumn in the west.
Like mandalas, these Kyoto screens are unified wholes and someone owning such a screen owned, in a way, Kyoto itself. Often, the more important places in the city carried captions indicating that this was the Gold Pavilion, that, the Silver.
The earliest of these screens, those acquired by the daimyo Asakura Sadakage in 1506, have been interpreted as an indication of a general sense of longing that these provincial warlords felt for urban culture -- including perhaps even possible political designs on controlling this culture themselves.
The modern viewer may thus see these Kyoto screens as visual statements of a cultural status attained through association with the capital, and can notice that some were indeed constructed specifically for provincial daimyo.
At the same time, however, any examination of the Kyoto screens from their late medieval beginnings into the national unification of the early 17th century shows that these paintings equally chart sociopolitical networks and physical changes within the capital itself, thus speaking more to the interests of those in the city rather than to those outside it.
Simultaneously, these screens confer legitimacy to particular political interests. This interpretation depends first on a reading of the screens that recognizes the selective process behind what is represented, one which examines the relationships between those places and which gauges the relative amount and variety of emphasis accorded. In this sense the screens are political statements.
One of the political purposes was to underscore the legitimacy of the newly ascendant Tokugawa regime. Here the author's critical approach considers the relevant screens in light of contemporary reports such a diaries, chronicles and ritual accounts. This is accompanied and contrasted to a thematic account that isolates motifs, deciphers them and compares these with depictions in other works.
This combined approach allows the author to convincingly link his subject to its politics and to communicate a new and much more complete insight into the cityscape painting genre. His argument is lavishly illustrated in reproductions both in color and in monochrome, accompanied by maps and detailed graphs that allow us to locate within the screens the objects referred to.
In all, this work differs significantly from previous studies that have typically taxonomized the screens and sorted them, considered each in isolation, but looked no further. Matthew Philip McKelway, in this excellent study, has connected the screens to their origins, their subject and their actual concerns, both overt and covert.
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