Heian Wall

Munakata Shikō, one of the most highly acclaimed Japanese painters and woodblock print artist of the twentieth century, created this small painting during a visit to New York in 1967, when the Asia Society was hosting an exhibition entitled “Japanese Arts of the Heian Period.” The artist did not create many such works, yet it encapsulates both his distinctive, brusque way of wielding a brush, and at the same time his own deep commitment to traditional Buddhist art. It shows one of the displays from the exhibition of a seated Buddha, presented as if on a real altar.

Munakata’s early prints were discovered in the mid-1930s by the prominent art critic Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961), who was an advocate for mingei, or “folk art,” which he saw as embodying two quintessential aspects of Japanese art: a deep respect for the materiality of the medium and a bold, direct, unselfconscious mode of expression. Munakata’s mingei approach was further enhanced by his immersion in Zen Buddhist philosophy as well as by his fascination with European experiments in Post-Impressionist art—van Gogh, whom he idolized, as well as the German Expressionists—which enabled him to create an entirely new style of Japanese woodcut that propelled him to international fame.