VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus bu… Read more

ART METALWORK IN THE EARLY SHOWA PERIOD For the conservative metalworker and historian Katori Hozuma (1874-1954) the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 marked the moment, in his own craft as well as in ceramics and other media, when the established style of what we might call the 'long Meiji period' - based on the traditional master-apprentice relationship - gave way to what he regarded as a (probably regrettable) modernism and internationalism.1 In reality, however, faith in the potential of the crafts as a form of independent self-expression had taken root almost a generation earlier thanks to other members of Katori's generation such as Fujii Tatsukichi (1881-1964), Tsuda Seifu (1880-1978) and the potter Tomimoto Kenkichi (1884-1963),2 and their movement was given a decisive boost by the 1925 Paris Art Deco exhibition which was attended by, among others, Tsuda Shinobu (lot 133) who served on one of the juries. Tsuda was in Europe on a research visit commissioned by the government and given his conventional Tokyo Art School background one could easily imagine him confining his researches to purely technical matters in an early-Meiji spirit, but his experiences in Paris inspired him to become a tireless advocate and exponent of Art Deco. As Katori remarked, metalwork played a particularly important part in early Japanese Art Deco and during the early years of the Teiten exhibition's Crafts Section, inaugurated in 1927, the displays appear to have been dominated by pioneering metal pieces such as Naito Haruji's Wall Clock (1927) and vases with embossed decoration, Takamura Toyochika's (1890-1974) Construction for Flower Arrangement (1926) and fountains, and Tsuda's and Katori's animals and facetted vases, alongside more traditional offerings such as the decorative plaques of Yotsuya Seibi. Although the detailed documentation of the Teiten and subsequent official exhibitions offers important evidence for the evolution of craft metalwork in the pre-war years, the research focus to date in both Japan and the West has been either on the painting and sculpture of the period or on trends in commercial art, and many practitioners such as Soryo Masachika (lot 132) are still little more than names, appearing only once or twice in the official listings. The current state of knowledge is not unlike that of Meiji-period metalwork and other crafts about twenty years ago and on that analogy there is no doubt that much remains to be discovered. NOTES 1 Katori Hozuma, Nihon no chukin [Japanese metalwork] (Tokyo, Mikasa Shobo, 1942), pp. 138, 140-1 2 Menzies, Jackie (ed.), Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910-1935 (Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998), p. 50 For other examples of metalwork from this period see for example Tokyoto Teien Bijutsukan, Aru deco to toyo: 1920-30 nendai Pari o yumemita jidai [Art Deco and the Orient: 1920s-1930s Longing for Paris] (Tokyo, 2000); Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan Kogeikan, Gendai kogei no shusaku [Masterpieces of Contemporary Japanese Crafts] (Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, 1977), cat. nos. 99-107 THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN

A PAIR OF CYLINDRICAL VESSELS

SIGNED MATAAKI, SHOWA PERIOD (MID-20TH CENTURY)

Details

A PAIR OF CYLINDRICAL VESSELS
Signed Mataaki, Showa Period (Mid-20th Century)
With dark-brown patination, the exteriors cast with two circumferential lines and divided vertically into three wide and three narrow panels, the narrow panels each with an Art Deco-style cruciform motif embellished with silver-coloured metal and with other linear ornament, each signed on the base Mataaki Hayakawa with a kao
9 7/16in. (23.9cm.) high (2)

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

More from JAPANESE ART AND DESIGN

View All