Japanese Screen Paintings

HAA 289G Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This graduate course surveys the history and development of the folding-screen format in Japanese painting from the 8th to the 20th centuries. Through a series of case studies, the course explores art historical issues for which the folding screen provides a unique perspective, including the relationships between painting and architectural space, poetic practice, and religious ritual.  

Functioning simultaneously as furniture and pictorial surface, spatial divide and architectural decor, the folding screen has played an important role in shaping culture and lived experience in the Japanese archipelago for over a millennium.  Transportable and displayable in a variety of ways, the folding screen can surround a space and immediately charge it with meaning. Some of the most historically significant Japanese paintings were executed in this format, and its influence around the world can be seen in everything from the painted panels of James McNeil Whistler to the biombo of colonial Latin America. This graduate lecture surveys the history and development of the Japanese folding screen from the 8th to the 20th centuries. 

Each week will focus on one case study from the screen painting tradition to highlight a historical theme and methodological problem closely linked to the unique properties of this format. These themes offer a range of issues crucial to the reconceptualization of Japanese painting history as a whole: 1) The function of screens in different social spaces (the Nara Imperial Palace, the Heian aristocratic compound, the Buddhist temple hall, the Ashikaga shogunal residence; or the modern reception room); 2) the various text-image relationships embodied by different types of screens (including both the relationship of painting to poetic practice and the pictorialization of narrative texts); 3) the role of screens in religious ritual, including the Esoteric initiation (abisekha) ceremony and mortuary practice; 4) compositional strategies reflected in the adaptations of painting subjects in other formats to the folding-screen surface; 5) the function of screens as representations of different types of topoi, charged with a panoply of political and cultural meanings; and 6) the interpretation of depictions of screens within other paintings.