Dr. Timothy Potts, director of The Kimbell Art Museum, commented: “These works epitomize two very different streams within Japanese art: the evocation of fearsome otherworldly spirits, in this case representing guardians of the Buddhist faith; and the celebration of the natural charm and beauty of plants, animals, and landscape. Each adds strength to what is already a very fine collection of scroll paintings and other East Asian art. Both for the aesthetic pleasure they will give and for the insights they will provide, they are destined to become favorites with our visitors.”

Gigaku Mask

This expressive mask from Japan’s Nara period (710-­794 A.D.) depicts Karura, which is one of the fourteen characters in the gigaku, a religious dance performance that was conducted in Japanese Buddhist temple ceremonies from the seventh to the 10th centuries. In the gigaku performance, Karura is a mythical giant bird that protects the Buddhist faith. The distinctive features of Karura include pierced, close-set eyes that stare down toward the tip of a prominent beak that grasps a round bead, and a cock’s comb which projects from the crown of the head. Holes covering the top of the head originally secured tufts of feather-like hair. The mask is constructed in hollow-core dry lacquer (dakkatsu kanshitsu), one of the favored methods for making temple sculpture in eighth-century Japan, and bears traces of the original black lacquer coating over which was applied gesso and then red, green and blue pigments.

The Kimbell’s gigaku mask is one of only nine known gigaku masks outside of Japan. Hayashi Tadamasa (1853-­1906), the renowned Japanese art dealer and collector who contributed significantly to the formation of French taste and knowledge of Japanese art in the late 19th century, originally owned the mask. It has been preserved in private collections in Paris since the late 19th century.

The precise nature of gigaku (literally, “skill music”) is not clear, but it appears to have been a dramatic form of religious dance and procession performed to the accompaniment of simple musical arrangements on flute, gong, and drum and which was associated with the Japanese royal court and Buddhist temple ceremonies. The costumed performers wore masks that covered all but the back of the head of the performer. Gigaku masks were robustly expressive and basically comic in nature, as it seems the purpose of the gigaku dance-drama was to inject a note of comic relief into the solemn, time-consuming rituals of Buddhism. Gigaku was introduced into Japan from China in 612 and developed along with the spread of Buddhism in Japan during the Asuka period (552-­710 A.D.), reaching its peak of popularity during the Nara period (710-­794 A.D.).

Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon Hanging Scroll

This charming painting by Kyoto artist Ito Jakuchu (1716­-1800) depicts a mother gibbon dangling her baby by the arm as she hangs from a tendril suspended from a tree. The title of the painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon, is a reference to the Zen Buddhist concept that simple people and animals often mistake the reflection of the moon for the moon itself. In this case it is both the baby gibbon and its mother who are trying to grasp the moon’s reflection in the water: though not physically depicted here, the moon’s presence is understood. The subject also alludes to the dilemma of the human condition: we reach for the unreal (in this case the reflection of the moon) instead of looking for proper spiritual substance. This enchanting painting epitomizes Jakuchu’s expert brushwork and his constant paring down to essential visual elements.

One of only two known paintings of gibbons by Jakuchu, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon joins the Kimbell’s other Jakuchu painting, Fukurojin, the God of Longevity and Wisdom, dated to about 1790.

Jakuchu is one of three 18th-century Japanese painters who are traditionally grouped as the great “individualists” or “eccentrics” of their time. Jakuchu’s style ranged from colorful, decorative works on silk to daring compositions in ink. Beginning in the 1760s and throughout the 1770s he began to seek extended periods of seclusion at the Obaku Zen temple of Sekihoji, south of Kyoto. This coincided with an expansion and shift in Jakuchu’s use of the ink-monochrome style that also began in the 1760’s. The painting Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon corresponds to the period from 1760 until his final decade when Jakuchu increasingly chose to depict Zen subjects executed in ink-monochrome style in which basic and geometric forms would assume increasing prominence over any approximation of realism.