The Art Institute of Chicago and Saint Louis Art Museum recently organized a visually rich exhibition featuring thirty-two Japanese folding-screen compositions from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Sporting a different title at each location, the exhibition brought together the best of both collections and smartly used the diverse works to present a multi-faceted introduction to the folding screen.

The two museums fashioned surprisingly different viewing experiences. With illustrated, bilingual gallery texts, detailed individual labels, and a looping video on a contemporary work that periodically sent classical bugaku music reverberating throughout its high-ceilinged galleries, the Art Institute offered abundant cultural, literary, religious, and art-historical information. Wall panels described the folding screen’s construction, conservation needs, origins, traditional use, appeal for collectors in the West, modern adaptations, and contemporary innovations. A number of screens were rotated in halfway, encouraging a second visit. The lofty title, Beyond Golden Clouds: Japanese Screens from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum, resonated with the Art Institute’s last exhibition of screens, Worlds Seen and Imagined: Japanese Screens from the Idemitsu Museum of Arts (1995), and seemed to allude poetically to an intellectual space beyond the surface appeal of gold-leafed, painted surfaces where one could come to a deeper understanding of the folding screen. This may explain the relatively subdued display. Under the muted logo of a dull blue moon peeking out from pale mustard yellow clouds painted on the walls, the screens were displayed on uniformly low platforms that blended into the brownish hues of the walls and flooring.

In contrast, the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Five Centuries of Japanese Screens: Masterpieces from the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago was a prominent event replete with huge banners and signage in the lobby, special admissions tickets, and staggered admittance. On a recent “Free Friday,” the exhibition’s popularity was evident in the number of visitors who animatedly discussed, carefully sketched, or quietly contemplated the works. Instead of a rotation of screens, all but four were shown for the duration of the exhibition. The galleries offered a comfortable viewing experience by raising the platforms for the screens at least a foot or two off the floor, making it easy to study the compositions, and creating separate, intimate spaces for viewing each work. The ceiling was painted black to give a more dramatic lighting effect. The arrangement of screens in aisles defined a viewing progression that aroused curiosity for the screens to come. The partitioned spaces also played interestingly with the folding-screen format and complemented the works’ colors. One could enjoy the delicate brushwork and coloring in older compositions and feel the monumentality or power in the modern or contemporary ones.

The catalogue handsomely supplements the educational aims of the exhibition with an admirable academic thoroughness and forms an elegant, lasting reference book for the two museum collections. Every work is fully introduced and reproduced with beautiful color photography; every verse or inscription is transcribed, translated, and presented in an essay or entry; and every essay (summarized in Japanese) offers an engaging argument appealing to both the specialist and general audience. The essays by the curators, Janice Katz of the Art Institute and Philip K. Hu of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and contributor Alicia Volk (University of Maryland) go a step further, each ambitiously encapsulating whole histories of a specific nature, such as the pre-twentieth-century evolution of the Japanese folding screen (Katz), the interaction between Chinese and Japanese artistic traditions through the centuries (Hu), and the history of modern and contemporary screens (Volk). The essay by Tamamushi Satoko (Musashino Art University), in contrast, probes deeply the cultural context and aesthetic experience of one work (discussed below). Individual entries written by distinguished scholars from such institutions as Harvard University, Chicago’s DePaul University, and the University of Zurich offer a cornucopia of cultural facts, technical information, and art-historical knowledge. The research is magnificent. Two essays in the catalogue remind us that art-historical writing can also be breathtaking. The essays by Tamamushi and Volk fascinate with provocative theses and excite with analytical rigor and research.

Tamamushi’s essay, “Tosa Mitsuoki’s Screens of Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maples with Poem Slips in the Context of Kazari and Tsukuri,” translated by Margaret Miller Kanada with Noriko Murai, unites a pointed call to rethink the aesthetic nature of screens in general—to find a better lens and conceptual framework to view them—with a meticulous investigation of the Tosa screens in particular. At issue is the conventional use of such Western concepts as “decorativeness” or “fine art” and the neglect or misunderstanding of such Japanese concepts as kazari (referencing a type of decoration or ornamentation) or tsukuri (defined as “artifice or fabrication”). The essay proves its point by crafting an astonishing elucidation of the screens’ cultural meaning. It explains the screens’ references to the ancient tradition among nobility of hosting elegant poetry contests. As these events often included special costuming and the creation of decorated settings with poetry slips tied in inventive ways to beautiful presentation items, they elicited appreciation for the elegance, perfection, and clever, playful, or symbolic intent of such assemblages. The screens are situated in a sophisticated space where the highest poetic literary art, calligraphy, pictorial and plastic art forms, and social interplay intersect. In addition to illuminating these cultural and aesthetic functions, Tamamushi effectively defines the screens’ likely elite patronage (where nobility and military merge), the auspicious nature of their subject matter (seen in the selection of poems and seasonal motifs of spring and autumn), and the aristocratic nature of this particular variation of the “clouds and brocade” (cherry and maple) composition. The essay brings to life the thrill of “solving” an art-historical case with solid research and evidence. It makes us care about interesting characters like Tôfukumon’in (consort to Emperor Gomizunoo, daughter of the second Tokugawa shogun, and aunt to Hideyoshi’s wife) and the reasons why works such as the Tosa screens were created.

Volk’s essay on modern and contemporary screens undertakes the challenge of not only introducing the stylistic and conceptual diversity of post-Edo-period works, but also charting the changing iconic values attached to the format over time. She does this while providing context for understanding individual works in the exhibition. While Tamamushi’s essay calls for a new lens to examine such works as the Tosa screens, Volk’s essay uses a lens that has a kaleidoscopic beauty. There is a simultaneous tracking of not only the meaning of individual works as they pertain to artists and audiences, but also the shifting metaphorical importance of the format for Japan and the West as it resurfaces in private Meiji-era parlors; world fairs or public exhibitions in places like Paris, London, and Chicago; the national academy (now known as the Tokyo School of Fine Arts) or government-sponsored salon (Bunten); and post-war or contemporary artists’ dialogues on cultural identity in a global consciousness. The same format that became a hallmark of modern Japanese-style painting (Nihonga), dripping with national identity and pride, became also a space to explore cultural synthesis with traditions outside Japan, and in the hands of some Western-style (yôga) painters, a means to question Japanese aesthetic traditions. Concepts of “decorativeness” and kazari are revisited in the divergent aspirations of Kayama Matazô (1927–2004), known for probing Japanese decorative traditions, and Shinohara Ushio (b. 1932), who made it an avant-garde principle not to pursue beauty. The explosion of modern or contemporary issues linked to the folding-screen format suggests we need not worry about dated, flawed concepts of the “decorative” restricting interpretations of meaning any longer. There are too many new avenues to explore in terms of fresh tensions between fine art and pop art, fine art and craft, past and present, native and foreign, form and space, time and change, or “made in Japan” commercialism and Western demand.

The concept of showcasing a museum’s collection of folding screens is not new (exhibitions of screens from the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in 1997, and from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2001, come to mind), but this exhibition updates and globalizes the approach. References to international consciousness go beyond early Edo-period “Southern Barbarian” images and Japonism in the West. Katz writes of the screen’s journey to New Spain and production of Novohispanic screens during the seventeenth-century, while Hu reminds us that the long influence of China extends into the twentieth century. One learns about large exotic birds native to Indonesia in the “Blue Phoenix” screens by Ômura Kôyô (1891–1983) and the multicultural context for the “Mountain Lake Screen Tachi” series created in the United States (Virginia) by Ôkura Jirô (b. 1942). The exhibition represents an intensive collaboration between museums, scholars, countries, and academic disciplines that bodes well for the future. Perhaps the final frontier for advancing appreciation and study of screens is more technical than intellectual, when large-scale folding screens can finally be freed from the width of printed pages.