Pine Trees

The test is subtractive, and the work is already the result of subtraction: no figure, no hut, no shore, no path, no colour, no gold. What remains is pines, the air between them and one far peak, and each is required. Take away the peak and the left screen loses its depth and its season; take away the dark near grove at the right and the pair has no foreground from which the mist recedes; take away the emptiness and there is no work. What holds the axis below the top is length. The groves are a sequence along twelve panels, and a sequence of like units can lose one without collapse; and the joins, where the composition does not run cleanly from panel to panel, show that the order of the parts was not wholly fixed by the work itself.

Score: 8.7 / 10

What is seen is given by what is withheld. The pines exist for the eye only as degrees of emergence from the air, and the air, which is never painted, is what the picture shows: presence and absence lie on one continuum of ink, and the world is visible as appearing and withdrawing at once. That can be stated, and it holds; no other Japanese painting states it so wholly. But much of what the screens give is a state, stillness, damp cold, the hush of early morning, and a mood ranks below a meaning. The meanings commonly drawn, impermanence, Buddhist emptiness, a father’s grief, are brought to the screens by readers and cannot be read off them. The disclosure is of seeing, as in Water Lilies (7.9), made with less.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is constant across both screens and of one cold kind, the sublime of withdrawal. The near pines at the right stand dark and wet, their needles struck in fast diagonal strokes; behind them other trees go grey and then nearly vanish, and the eye goes into the mist and does not come back with anything. In the left screen the faint peak, given only by the white of the paper and a breath of wash, raises the whole field into height and distance. The emptiness between groves is not rest between summits: there the elevation is greatest, since there the mind supplies a forest the brush did not. It recurs at every grove. What holds it a step below The Starry Night (9.2) is range: one register, hush and awe, with no terror and no warmth.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The pine is one of the deepest images in East Asian culture: the evergreen through winter, emblem of longevity and constancy, in Japan the tree in which a god may descend, the tree painted on the back wall of every Noh stage. The mist is the threshold between the seen and the unseen; the snow-capped peak is the mountain as the abode of what does not die. All of this is present to anyone who knows the tradition, and none of it is built. The screens carry no programme: no sacred figure, no narrative, no named place, no arrangement of pines that encodes the archetype. They are particular pines in particular weather, and the archetype is what the viewer brings. The restraint is part of their force; myth summoned by a motif still stands below myth that bears weight.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is threefold: the ink painting of the Southern Song, above all Muqi, whose mists Tōhaku knew from works held in Kyoto temples, Daitokuji among them; the Japanese ink tradition of Sesshū and the Kanō, built on line, outline and solid ground; and the Momoyama screen as Kanō Eitoku and Tōhaku himself practised it, in gold, colour and monumental trees. The departure: Muqi’s atmosphere, made for scrolls and small fields, carried to the scale of a pair of screens, with the ground, the outline and the gold given up and a large share of the surface left to the paper. In the decade of gold-leaf screens it is a turn to nothing. The stake is the unsettled part: if the paintings began as a draft, as is debated, the wager was private, and risked less than a commissioned pair would have.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The work knows what it knows as ink on paper on folding screens. On absorbent paper the mist exists because wet ink spreads and fades into the fibres and the paper’s own colour is the air; in oil the same picture would be a painting of fog, not fog. Set up in its zigzag, the panels come forward and fall back, so that groves on a forward fold advance and those in a valley recede, and the folds double the depth the ink makes. Seen at a seated eye the field runs wider than the eye can hold, and the viewer is inside the weather rather than before a view. Substitute a hanging scroll and the enclosure goes; hang it flat and the folds go. Held below the top because the screen form may have been given to the paintings after they were made.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The screens yield on return, in two kinds. Formally, each look finds more trees farther back, ink so pale it can be taken for a stain on the paper, and the boundary of what is painted keeps moving. Semantically, the questions stay open and are not trivial: whether it is a finished work or a draft; whether the sheets are in their first order; whether the pines are of the Noto coast where Tōhaku was born, or of no place; whether the screens mourn his son Kyūzō or have nothing to do with him; where Tōhaku takes from Muqi and where he leaves him. The evidence is recent: the screens’ fame and close study belong to the twentieth century, and the record before it is thin. Level with Water Lilies (8.7) on yield, and held below it on the length of the record.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is Japanese painting of the Momoyama and early Edo decades, and here force and reach part. The intrinsic force is high: the screens reorganise what ink painting in Japan could do, turning a borrowed Chinese mode into a monumental art of absence, the emptiness made structural and the subject reduced to air and one kind of tree; no earlier Japanese painting gives the unpainted so much of the work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Hasegawa school did not long outlast its founder’s generation, the Kanō held the field through the Edo period, and no line of painters is known to descend from this pair. The reach came late, in the twentieth century, as the emblem of a Japanese aesthetic of mist, emptiness and restraint, cited by painters, designers and writers in Japan and abroad; delayed influence is credited and discounted.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole; the groves, the mist and the peak are legible, and nothing that carried the work’s meaning is lost. Against it stands the arrangement: if the sheets were rearranged when they were mounted, as is debated, the form now seen is partly a later hand’s, and the discontinuities at the joins put the question. Presence: more than four centuries, but the record of the screens before the modern period is thin, and their wide fame dates from the twentieth century. Fabric: ink on paper, remounted and fragile. Centuries with the form whole would place the axis higher; the possible rearrangement and the thin early presence hold it a step below that, and still above Water Lilies (8.9), whose survival is of one century.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of ink on paper at the scale of the screen, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the whole work is in the gradation of one material from near black to almost nothing. The near needles are struck in rapid, broad, slanting strokes, so wet and fast that the brush’s speed can be read. Farther trees are laid in pale wash while the paper is still receptive, and their edges are let go into it; the farthest are a tone barely above the paper’s own. Absorbent paper takes each stroke once, without correction. The costs: the paper is coarse in places and some joins are awkward. Whether these are the painter’s or the mounter’s is not certain, and the figure takes a small charge for them.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the darkest near pine at the right of the right screen, wet and heavy, and the snowy peak at the top of the left screen, given almost wholly by the paper. They obey one law. Density of ink is presence and nearness; the paper is air, distance and snow alike; every element in the work sits on that one scale, and nothing breaks it. No other physics enters: no line of ground, no colour, no human sign. The law governs the whole completely. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small: pines, mist and one mountain, in one weather, at one hour, in one season. The law of Water Lilies (8.9) holds a day, from dawn to sunset and from open water to shade; this holds less, as completely.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The orders held are three, perhaps four: the natural order, in trees, air, weather and mountain; consciousness, in the perception the work makes its subject, the eye going into the mist; time, faintly, in season and hour, the cold of winter or early spring and the stillness of morning; and the sacred, only as the pine and the peak evoke it. They are integrated: the one scale of ink places each. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is everything else: no person, no dwelling, no labour, no city, no state, no history and no family, though readers have brought a family to it in the dead son. The form chose this, and the figure describes the form. It stands below Water Lilies (6.5), which holds the course of a day and the heavens reflected, where this holds one moment of one weather.

Score: 6.2 / 10