The Subtle Magic of Koetsu

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Koetsu was the first Japanese to sign one of his own tea bowls--the famous "Fuji" bowl, now designated a national treasure by the Japanese and hence unable to be shown in the U.S.--but he never ran his own kiln. Like Rikyu before him, Koetsu worked with a family of potters whose name came to stand for a whole class of rough, low-fired pottery: raku ware. Unlike Rikyu, though, Koetsu got his hands dirty, shaping the clay, carving it with knife and spatula.

It is still a surprise, for people used to the immaculate technical refinement of Sevres or Wedgwood, to see the lack of finish of Koetsu tea bowls. Slumped, pitted, cratered, they seem to preserve the primal character of the earth from which they're made. They're so uneven that you'd think they'd wobble if set on a table. Instead of pattern or fine painting, their surfaces are all drips and cracks that, contemplated in the dim natural light of the teahouse, may suggest large natural events. One of the most beautiful bowls in this show, black glaze on a gritty brown ground, has an almost thunderous gravity that suits the name bestowed on it by earlier owners, Amagumo, or "Rain Clouds."

To the uninitiated, such objects may look like cowpats, but their roughness has always made them precious to the Japanese connoisseur. Koetsu once sold his house to raise the money--30 gold coins--for a particularly famous old tea caddy he yearned to buy. Later he came to see the ownership of such exalted things as "a nuisance" and the antiquarian enthusiasms they aroused as irrelevant: better to make them for oneself.

Koetsu's name is also associated with lacquer, another of the chief Japanese arts. "Associated" because it is highly unlikely that he actually made the lacquer boxes himself; the technique was too demanding and took too long to acquire. Clearly he knew a lot about lacquer and was immersed in its possibilities--not a surprise, because he was well known as an expert on the classification of swords, whose scabbards and other fittings were always adorned with lacquer. Clearly too he liked innovations in technique that may seem small to us but, in the tradition-bound and slow-moving context of Japanese art and design, were quite significant. One was the near alchemical contrast of dull lead inlay and bright gold detail on black lacquer in works like the beautiful writing box named Ashibune, or "Reed Boat."

But in the end Koetsu is one of those artists who elude classifications, even those of his own time and place. He remains the consummate amateur, drawing his authority from the peculiar independence of his work. It's not surprising that there is no one else quite like him in the West, because there was no one else in Japan either.