Swipe to explore a scene of natural beauty, erudite conversation, and convivial consumption. 🍃🍶⁠
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Currently on view at NOMA, this folding screen and its pair present a lively and engaging scene of scholars gathered together in a rural setting. Yokoi Kinkoku, one of the great individualist painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Japan, chose as his subject an 8th-century drinking poem by the Chinese poet Du Fu. The poem documented an actual drinking club made up of eight Tang-dynasty scholars, famed for their capacity to consume copious amounts of alcohol. The red-robed fellow being dragged along, visible in slide number two, is Li Bo, another of the greatest poets in Chinese history.⁠
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A monk of the Shugendo sect, Kinkoku was an irreverent iconoclast who, due to his habitual drunkenness and disregard for orthodoxy, was removed from positions of authority in several monastic establishments. Eventually he found stability and notoriety in Shugendo, a syncretic religion that brought together Shinto mountain worship, Buddhism, and folk religion.⁠
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Among its spiritual exercises was ritualized mountain climbing, thought to bring its practitioners supernatural power. Kinkoku is now recognized as an idiosyncratic and inventive painter, famous for his dense mountain landscapes, as well as lively figural depictions.⁠
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This folding screen is currently on view in "Envisioning Japan: Transformational Gifts from Kurt A. Gitter, MD, and Alice Yelen Gitter," which honors more than five decades of philanthropy by the Gitters.⁠
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🎨: Yokoi Kinkoku, "Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup," 1815. Ink and color on paper. Museum Purchase, 2023.2.a,b.⁠
📍: Third floor, Kurt A. Gitter, MD, and Alice Yelen Gitter Gallery ...