В пучине бренного мира. Японское искусство и его коллекционер Сергей Китаев - [75]

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Denkosai / Shisai (?). Xylophone (mokkin), shogi figures and a screen with the depiction of sparrows. Big surimono. 1850. Collection of Georg Gross, Zurich.

The commemorative surimono dedicated to the 13th anniversary of Utaemon III with inclusion of his poem signed by his literary alias Baigyoku.

Among the six hundred entries that I rewrote or added, some were inexplicably ignored. One instance involves a large-format surimono by Denkosai depicting a xylophone (mokkin) with shogi (a form of Japanese chess) pieces (no. 62, vol. 1, p. 38, acc. no. A. 29014). There are no inscriptions or signature, just a seal with the mysterious, never found anywhere else name Denkosai[259]. While looking through the private collection of Erich Gross in Zurich in August 2007, I made the connection that this print is actually about a quarter of a large surimono (44 × 55.9 cm) printed with several poems signed by Eishi, Karoku, Baika and others and commissioned by Nakamura Utaemon IV to commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of the death of his father, the famous kabuki actor Nakamura Utaemon III, and thus should be dated to 1850. Utaemon III used the poetry name Baigyoku. Sure enough, the left half of the surimono in the Gross collection depicts a screen with three sparrows on rice panicles. In the upper part is a poem signed Baigyoku. This separated section of the print was listed in the Pushikin zuroku as an independent entry, a surimono by an artist named Baigyoku (no. 978, p. 164, A. 29024). In the manuscript of the 2008 Pushkin Catalogue, this “Baigyoku” was completely missing, along with numerous other entries found in the Pushikin zuroku. My suggestion to combine these two parts, search for the cut-off upper-right quarter with poems and publish next to it the intact print from the Gross Collection was rejected without explanation. “Baigyoku” was not published. Maybe it could not be found.

It is difficult to highlight any special prints from a typical roster of big names. The catalogue represents the usual fare of Hiroshige and Hokusai series, Utamaro women, Eizan, Eisen. What is distinctive is that they look as though they failed to pass numerous crash tests. Among the almost obliterated prints are rarities such as Hokusai’s Small Shell (Kogai) (no. 439, vol. 1, p. 313) from the 1821 surimono series Genroku Immortal Shell Matching Contest (Genroku kasen kai awase); the only other known example is in the Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art.

However, there are still a few unique prints in reasonably good condition, including two surimono by Ryūryūkyo Shinsai (1764(?)–1820/23). Still Life with a Target was commissioned by the Taikogawa (Drum group) kyо̄ka poetry club and bears three poems, one by the group’s leader, Dondontei. A similar surimono is described by Roger Keyes in his catalogue of the Chester Beatty Library collection as “Bow, Arrow and Target on Stand.” Keyes identified it as a Group D copy and indicated that the original was in the Art Institute of Chicago[260]. He did not include an illustration. Upon visiting the Art Institute’s Japanese print room in March 2008, I realized that they have a slightly different print – theirs has a bonsai plum tree in blossom, missing in the Kitaev print, and the target stand has a different design. The surimono in the Pushkin Catalogue appears to be a previously unknown print from what looks like a small series of Shinsai’s Targets, not yet identified.

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Ryuryukyo Shinsai

Target, bow and arrows. Surimono. Shikishiban. Published in Impressions Journal, 2011, vol. 32, p. 58.

There are also several dozens of never previously studied or published surimono of the Osaka and Shijо̄schools. (Some were in the 1993 Pushikin zuroku – but there was not a full presentation there.) The catalogue also contains sections of more marginal material, such as stickers collected by pilgrims visiting temples (senjafuda, “stickers from a thousand temples”), book wrappers (fukuro-e), folk paintings known as Otsu-e, prints on fan shapes and crepe-paper prints (chirimen-e). A large group of mostly anonymous prints known as Bо̄shin War caricatures satirizes the clashes between pro-emperor forces and their shogunal rivals in 1867–68. Most of these prints were published in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Machida City Museum in 1995[261].

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Utagawa Hiroshige

(signed Utashige). Hachiman. Senjafuda. Published in Impressions Journal, 2011, vol. 32, p. 59.

Despite its idiosyncrasies, the 2008 catalogue of prints in the Pushkin Museum is a valid contribution to the library of ukiyo-e reference publications. It sheds some light on a long-neglected collection, locked away much as was its owner, Sergei Nikolaevich Kitaev, undone by his desire to preserve it.

Литература

Бежин Л. Е. Под знаком “ветра и потока”. М.: Наука, 1982.

Белли В. А. В Российском Императорском флоте: воспоминания. СПб.: Петербургский институт печати, 2005.

Бенуа А. Н. Дневник. 1916–1918. М.: Захаров, 2010.

В российских музеях недосчитались 50 тысяч культурных ценностей // http://lenta.ru/news/2008/07/17/museums/.