s of 20th-century Americans.
But the Japanese garments and interiors depicted in these visual works are very unlike those from European or American culture. One gets the sense of a self-confident world, closed off to most outside influences. In an exhibition of French images covering the same period, dramatic visual changes would be obvious. The stylistic development from medieval to the classicism of Nicolas Poussin and on to modernism would make it easy to date the representations. Here, however, such changes in style are not obvious. In Japan, the catalogue says, aesthetic innovation was not of prime importance.
Many of the very beautiful images in the exhibition can be appreciated aesthetically, without knowing Japanese culture. And seeing the opaque clouds, the blown-off roofs that allow us to look into interiors, and the golden backgrounds, it’s easy to understand why, in the 19th century, Japanese art spoke to Western modernists. It’s easy to admire the marvelous six-panel folding screen from the late 16th century, “Genji in Exile at Suma,” in which a solitary messenger, like a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, who is coming to see Genji, seated in the distance on the far right. Or to appreciate the marvelously strange calligraphy by Konoe Nobotada (1565-1614), written over an abstract landscape.
But many of the pictures are puzzling, simply because it isn’t obvious what is going on. How, for example, can you fully appreciate the magnificent 14th or 15th century image of Genji in a carriage without knowing why the hero is in an ox-drawn cart?
Typically these paintings show tiny figures, often floating in a flattened space, without perspective. Who are they and what are they doing? To answer these questions just looking doesn’t suffice; you need to consult the novel. And the calligraphy raises more difficult interpretative problems. Mursaki’s characters are judged by the qualities of their handwriting, by their ability to write poems and draw, and for their connoisseur’s interest in fine papers. To fully appreciate this art, I imagine that you would need to fluently read and write Japanese. Indeed, that language has changed so much that even native speakers nowadays need a translation to read Genji. If we cannot read and write the language, we are often in the dark.
But sometimes we can learn by walking around the museum. Puzzling over how to understand this display, I went to another show at the Met, The Decorated Word: Writing and Picturing in Islamic Calligraphy (April 8 – November 3, 2019). Like the Japanese, Muslims are much concerned with writing. But where most of the writing in the Genji exhibition presents Mursaki’s fictional narrative, Islamic sacred calligraphy presents the words of the Qur’an, as communicated by God to Mohammed, an acute difference. And of course, in European old master visual art, handwriting is relatively unimportant.
Although these comparisons, in the end, didn’t help me understand this exhibition, they did provide a useful demonstration of interpretative problems. One important goal of the art museum is to bring art that is historically or geographically distant closer to our experience. The curator of an exhibition devoted to illustrations of the Bible might reasonably assume that the Met audience would have a general familiarity with the text. But unless you have read The Tale of Genji and know something about Japanese art, you are unlikely to understand the art here, which leads to the question of how much context a museum should provide.
Some people prefer to focus on the art, without the distractions of labels. Here, however, the paucity of such useful background information left this great visual exhibition drastically undermotivated. On the day I visited the Met’s most popular show — Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll, which was downstairs — it was so crowded that getting in the door was all but impossible. New York audiences generally know about guitars, but when it comes to old master Japanese art we really need instruction. Even when the Met was crowded, t