Review: From sacred monkeys to mysterious cats, marvelous ‘Animals in Japanese Art’ at LACMA

breathtaking pair of six-panel painted screens by Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795), Japan’s leading 18th century artist. Robert T. Singer, curator of Japanese art at the museum, had spent years negotiating an export license for the exceptional work, which certainly seems worthy of national treasure designation by the Japanese government, and philanthropist and museum trustee Camilla Chandler Frost stepped forward to make the incredible purchase possible.

The immaculately preserved screens display 17 life-size, hyper-real gray and red-crowned cranes arrayed across nearly 23 feet of abstract background in shimmering gold leaf. The crane paintings, publicly shown only twice in the previous 239 years, were instrumental in inspiring a large survey exhibition. “Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art” is on view through Dec. 8 in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion.

Three years after the stunning acquisition, a colleague at The Times reported some startling and related news, unleashing global pandemonium. Despite common assumptions among legions of fans, the hugely popular fictional character Hello Kitty, drawn by Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu, turns out not to be a cat.

Hello Kitty, a blank-faced licensing bonanza conceived by Shintaro Tsuji, founder of the Sanrio Co., certainly exhibits some feline features. Soft and pointy ears, brisk whiskers, button eyes and nose.

But carrying a jumper or a skirt and with a jaunty bow in her hair, she’s actually an opulent and gentle kitty who has been reimagined as a bit girl. The individual is a metamorphosis known in Japanese as Gijinka — the humanization of a nonhuman item or entity.

The splendid LACMA screen-paintings of stylish cranes stand close to the top of a extensive cultural spectrum’s high-artwork end, at the same time as Hello Kitty takes her place at the pinnacle of the popular-art give up. Cats are one historic symbol for exact fortune in Japanese artwork; cranes are some other, overlapping with toughness, on the grounds that folklore has it that a crane can live for 1,000 years. It’s no surprise that Hello Kitty doesn’t flip up a few of the almost two hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and other high artwork items in “Every Living Thing,” but cats clearly do.

One place is in “Cat Amid Spring Flowers,” an Edo period hanging scroll by Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799). A languid black-and-white cat is shown intently licking the fur of an extended paw.

 lower third of a tall, vertical length of silk, which is just over 3 feet high and a foot wide. At the panel’s left edge, entwined stems of garden flowers rise along the cat’s back. Rather than a defined landscape, the scene is marked by pale, horizontal washes of gray that create a dreamy, atmospheric space, like a cloudy sky.

This otherwise closely observed bit of naturalism also features something peculiar — namely, the cat’s contour or profile. Stretched out, its body curves around to suggest the form of a sphere. Against the hazy, atmospheric background, the cat’s black and white patterning dissolves into cloud-like shapes. It’s as if we are seeing a sun or moon silhouetted in the sky or perhaps reflected below in water.

The cat becomes a mysterious presence, an animal that occupies an ephemeral space somewhere between heaven and earth. Much Japanese art is infused with Shinto and Buddhist spiritual values, imported to the island through China and Korea, where nature spirits are a focus of worship. Belief in sacred power is often assigned to animals.

Coincidentally — and significantly — Rosetsu was a student of Ōkyo, painter of the magnificent cranes.

The birds are rendered with keen and perceptive realism. They parade proudly across the flat, horizontal expanse like avian surrogates for the leisurely people strolling a century later in Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

Direct observation of nature, partly informed by the artist’s interest in Western painting, merges with deep Japanese traditions of symbolic subject matter and graceful stylization. Rosetsu does the same, except he trades Ōkyo’s dramatic sense of grandeur for a quieter, more lyrical mood. It’s instructive to see the two, a generation apart in age, in the same show.

One other notable feature of these two works of art is that both are in LACMA’s own collection — as are many of the show’s greatest examples. Around half of the exhibition is from the museum’s impressive holdings, normally housed in the Pavilion for Japanese Art, which is closed for renovation.

In addition to Ōkyo’s “Cranes,” there’s a twelfth century pair of sacred monkeys from a Shinto shrine, hunched and curious in a disconcerting fusion of human and animal intuition, established next to an extraordinary display screen portray that suggests monkeys cavorting on a shrine’s roof; a tenth century pair of carved-wooden lions, their expressive, almost human faces mouthing the Sanskrit equivalents for alpha and omega, the start and the stop, lifestyles and demise; and a 6th century earthenware horse, a huge funerary animal equipped to be used inside the afterlife by using a long-gone noble. The exhibition affords welcome context for a number of the museum’s maximum effective and important works.

Negotiations have been underway for feasible acquisition of one of the most dynamic items, which instructions the show’s front. A huge carved statue of “Bishamonten: Guardian King of the North” blankets the Buddhist warrior-god in ferocious animals, actual and imaginary.

Dragons wrap his arms, a lion’s head growls at his waist, a tiger drapes down his back and an undefinable, mythic creature with fierce fangs crowns his head. These are beasts chosen genuinely (and successfully) to crank up a electricity photo. Eight and a 1/2 ft tall, the amazing, large-than-lifestyles sculpture is a rare instance of an precisely dated paintings, its hollow interior identifying its dedication for an event regarded to have taken place in 1124.

Spanning more than one thousand years, the display also includes a few contemporary works, which includes playful canine sculptures with the aid of Yoshitomo Nara and Yayoi Kusama. Polyester in no way appeared better than it does in three white, pleated attire designed in 1990 via Issey Miyake, held together with the aid of grommets and leather-based straps but stimulated through the fluttering of doves.

To give this type of huge-open roster of works some shape, the show is divided into a dozen sections. It starts offevolved with the animals of the Japanese zodiac, primarily based on China’s, and includes sections on faith and philosophy: Buddhism, Shinto, Daoism, Zen. Animals of earth, air and water get looked after out, as do those of delusion and foreign beginning — creatures of the faraway.

The exhibition turned into together prepared via the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it was visible over the summer, the Japan Foundation in Tokyo and LACMA, with Singer and student Kawai Masatomo as co-curators. It degrees a ways and extensive, presenting wonderful loans from scores of public and private collections within the U.S. And Japan.

If there’s a shortcoming, it’s most effective that the exhibition turned into trimmed by almost a third for presentation right here, perhaps a casualty of the museum’s truncated gallery area as LACMA’s deliberate constructing application gets underway. That’s a shame, given the quite remarkable issue, however there's nevertheless masses to see. You’ll depart questioning: Do animals play this kind of pervasive role in the art of any other culture?