Lot Essay
PUBLISHED:
George Kuwayama, Contemporary Japanese Prints (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972), no. 27.
For another impression in the Japan Society, New York, see Rand Castile, Shiko Munakata (1903-1975) Works on paper (New York: Japan Society Inc., 1982) no. 50. For an impression in which the dog in the upper left has no white spots see Omoi no saku/The World of Love, Munakata Shiko zenshu/The Complete Works of Shiko Munakata, vol. 9 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1978), pl. 194.
Another impression is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Helen and Felix Juda.
Munakata was inspired by a photograph, lost during the war, of a wall painting of a hunting scene in a Korean tomb of the Three Kingdoms period near Tsuko, Manchuria and by the Ainu fire festival in Hokkaido. Others have remarked that the posture of the hunters recalls figures in the art of Sassanian Persia. Munakata explained that each hunter is a representative from the realms of the Sky, the Earth or the Underworld. Using pure mind instead of bows and arrows they hunt flowers, symbolic of beauty and infinite pure mind, surrounded by animals and birds, prey in an impure world.
Dr. Priscilla Shames was awarded the UCLA Alfred E. Longweil Prize, for 1962-63 and the Association of American Poets Prize, 1963, for her poem on Hanakari sho. Dr. Shames' poem was published in the Juda's Newsletter on Contemporary Japanese Prints 2, no. 2 (May 1972):
MUNAKATA'S FLOWER HUNTING MURAL
Ink pleases him
more than color,
for black and white
go back to the beginning.
He is almost blind
and the pure black of sumi
gives him sight.
Barefoot, he squats
carving buddhas
out of unplaned boards.
The form, floating
upside down in his brain
like a hooked carp
suddenly released, swims away.
His gods promise nothing
but how to live
as men. They praise
life, joggle eternity
in the next street,
elbow up, ready to borrow
a wine cup or a wife.
Barefoot, he squats
carving men this time,
pausing to gulp
steaming tea, to pull
a nail from his board,
turning it this way and that.
He will find the prayer in it.
His men hunt flowers
like gods, their bows
without bowstrings,
their horses flying through air.
They praise life
without crushing one petal
in the endless carpet.
"The hunters have no bows
because they're after flowers
and so must hunt with the heart."
George Kuwayama, Contemporary Japanese Prints (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972), no. 27.
For another impression in the Japan Society, New York, see Rand Castile, Shiko Munakata (1903-1975) Works on paper (New York: Japan Society Inc., 1982) no. 50. For an impression in which the dog in the upper left has no white spots see Omoi no saku/The World of Love, Munakata Shiko zenshu/The Complete Works of Shiko Munakata, vol. 9 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1978), pl. 194.
Another impression is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Helen and Felix Juda.
Munakata was inspired by a photograph, lost during the war, of a wall painting of a hunting scene in a Korean tomb of the Three Kingdoms period near Tsuko, Manchuria and by the Ainu fire festival in Hokkaido. Others have remarked that the posture of the hunters recalls figures in the art of Sassanian Persia. Munakata explained that each hunter is a representative from the realms of the Sky, the Earth or the Underworld. Using pure mind instead of bows and arrows they hunt flowers, symbolic of beauty and infinite pure mind, surrounded by animals and birds, prey in an impure world.
Dr. Priscilla Shames was awarded the UCLA Alfred E. Longweil Prize, for 1962-63 and the Association of American Poets Prize, 1963, for her poem on Hanakari sho. Dr. Shames' poem was published in the Juda's Newsletter on Contemporary Japanese Prints 2, no. 2 (May 1972):
MUNAKATA'S FLOWER HUNTING MURAL
Ink pleases him
more than color,
for black and white
go back to the beginning.
He is almost blind
and the pure black of sumi
gives him sight.
Barefoot, he squats
carving buddhas
out of unplaned boards.
The form, floating
upside down in his brain
like a hooked carp
suddenly released, swims away.
His gods promise nothing
but how to live
as men. They praise
life, joggle eternity
in the next street,
elbow up, ready to borrow
a wine cup or a wife.
Barefoot, he squats
carving men this time,
pausing to gulp
steaming tea, to pull
a nail from his board,
turning it this way and that.
He will find the prayer in it.
His men hunt flowers
like gods, their bows
without bowstrings,
their horses flying through air.
They praise life
without crushing one petal
in the endless carpet.
"The hunters have no bows
because they're after flowers
and so must hunt with the heart."