Enfilade

From The Princeton University Art Museum:

Multiple Hands: Collective Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Painting
Princeton University Art Museum, 8 October 2011 — 22 January 2012

Curated by  Xiaojin Wu

The study of individual artists has dominated modern art history, to the neglect of the collective creativity that contributed to countless important works of art. In Japan, as in many other cultures, collective creativity played—and still plays—a significant role in art-making. The exhibition Multiple Hands: Collective Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Painting, through a selection of paintings from the Princeton University Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a private collection, provides a thoughtful consideration of the collective art-making process by focusing on two kinds of collective painting practices—workshop and collaborative— in eighteenth-century Japan.

Kano Tsunenobu, "Four Accomplishments," ca. 1700. Hanging silk scroll, 224.8 x 190.5 cm.

Interrelated but not identical, both practices involved multiple artists in the production of single works. In a workshop system, the head of the studio designed the composition of a painting, often a large-format work, and his assistants executed the details and applied colors. Only the master’s name was signed, however, making the presence of multiple hands in the paintings’ creation sometimes difficult to discern. Representative of the Kano school workshop—a prodigious hereditary apprentice system organized by generations of the Kano family from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century—is a pair
of large hanging scrolls, Four Accomplishments.

Kano Tsunenobu, "Four Accomplishments," ca. 1700. Hanging silk scroll, 224.8 x 190.5 cm.

Signed by the head of the workshop, Kano Tsunenobu (1636–1713), the two paintings exhibit the brushwork styles of more than one artist, particularly evident in the background. This signals the involvement of multiple workshop members in producing Four Accomplishments. Another important feature of the Kano workshop operation is the use of style manuals: workshop assistants had limited access to original paintings, so copies made by the head of the workshop served as style manuals that the assistants studied and relied on in collectively producing one work. Consequently, certain
motifs in a similar style are used repeatedly in different works, as
demonstrated by a painting of a long-tailed bird by Kano Tsunenobu
and a similar passage in his Four Accomplishments. (more…)