Rengetsu

An expert on Francisco Goya recently claimed that much of his accepted work was actually painted by helpers, pointing out, perhaps unnecessarily, that the value of an object collapses when it turns out to be by an assistant. ‘Artists in the shadow of a great master (can) illustrate his imagery, his style, his handling of paint, but the work is not infused with the unique individuality and strength of the original creator’, she said. This latter statement is rather more debatable than the first, and when I read it I was reminded of other ways of looking at the issue of authenticity, and of how I began to learn something about the work of the well-known Japanese poet, potter and calligrapher, Otagaki Rengetsu.

Some time ago, while browsing among  Japanese ceramics on an auction site, I came across a small jar that caught my eye. Coarsely made, one side was covered with a thick black glaze; the other was left raw, incised with an unidentified poem. The auction description said that the piece was old, but that it wasn’t made by Otagaki Rengetsu, whose style it resembled. It sold for far more than the estimate. A few weeks later it reappeared, so I deduced that either the buyer hadn’t paid or had returned it. The jar didn’t sell at the second attempt, but on the third time of asking it did, at a fraction of the price realised on the first occasion. This interested me, both because I liked the jar very much and because I couldn’t quite understand what was going on.

I began to do a little research on Rengetsu, and I soon discovered that she was a nun who had lived and worked near Kyoto during the second half of the 19th century.  Even to my untrained eye, I could see that the style and quality of the ceramics attributed to her varied dramatically, as did their value, but it seemed almost impossible to be sure what was authentic and - as often is the case with Japanese ceramics - what was ‘good’ and what was ‘indifferent’. As I kept on looking, regularly asking for information from dealers and sellers, occasionally buying small pieces, I slowly began to grasp what was going on. I found that there are many modern copies of her work, most of them tributes to Rengetsu’s  style and sensibility. There are also copies made in her own lifetime, collaborations with other ceramicists and assistants,  pieces made by assistants (who, with her permission, continued to sign their work with her name after her death), and , of course, her own productions, which range from quick and careless to the considered and accomplished.  Rengetsu lived until she was elderly, working constantly at her poetry, ceramics, calligraphy, and painting, and it is conjectured that she made about 50,000 pieces during her lifetime, so their quality is naturally inconsistent. Although one is fairly soon able to distinguish what are probably her best works from the rest, it is prudent to assume that there is almost always an element of ambiguity in attributions, and that it is appropriate to accept this in the same spirit as an appreciation of Japanese ‘kintsugi’, the gold-lacquered repairs that add to the beauty of so many broken or fractured pots. The contrast between refinement and haste, grace and ugliness, ubiquity and scarceness - all these oppositions are part of the appeal of Rengetsu’s work.

 Rengetsu, a Buddhist name that can be translated as ‘Lotus Moon’, was the daughter of a courtesan and a nobleman.  Adopted as a child by the Otagaki family, she was taught martial arts, literature, calligraphy, dancing, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony. Reputed to have been unusually beautiful, she married twice and had several children, all of whom died young. Following the death of her second husband Rengetsu became a Buddhist nun, kept moving home, and in old age settled permanently in a small tea hut in the grounds of a temple in Kyoto. After her ordination it became necessary to earn her own living,  so she took up pottery, deciding to produce inexpensive pieces that would be inscribed with her own ‘waka’ poetry.  It has been said that during Rengetsu’s lifetime they became so popular that most households in Kyoto owned examples of her work.

On her own admission, Rengetsu’s ceramics are rough and unskilled, but her poetry and calligraphy are sensitive and eloquent. The pots were made in the spirit of ‘wabi sabi’, a Japanese concept of beauty that alludes to the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete; in contrast, her calligraphy, which is found on scrolls, ‘tanzaku’, and paintings, is elegant, supple and strong. She wrote in ‘hiragana’, an old script rarely employed or understood today, which in the past was customarily used by women and less commonly by men. Similarly, although Rengetsu made cups and bottles for drinking ‘sake’, as well as utensils for the ‘chanoyu’ tea ceremony, most of her ceramics were intended for ‘sencha’, a less ceremonial version of tea drinking, again most often enjoyed by women. Her poems are traditional, self-effacing,  and full of feeling.

Living deep in the mountains
I’ve grown fond of the
solitary sound of the pines,
On days when the wind does not blow
How lonely it is!

I imagine, although this may be fanciful, that Rengetsu’s later years may have had something in common with those of the elderly Japanese woman in A Humble Life, a film by the Russian director, Alexander Sokurov. Umeno Matshueshi  lives alone in an old house in the mountains of Nara, spending her time in silence and equanimity, eating frugally, tending the fire, sewing, and praying. The camera observes her intently, juxtaposing interior mages of the wooden house, chilly and barely lit, with outside views of the garden, clouds, streams, and forest.  At the end of the film the old woman recites her own ‘haiku’ poems about loneliness and loss. A Humble Life is beautiful and dreamlike, its elegiac mood close in tone to the first section of Sokurov’s extraordinary Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War, a prolonged visual meditation on a melancholic snowy landscape, overlaid with murmured reflections on the deaths of Mozart and his mother. The film ends, more than five hours later, with brooding views of a dark mountain range on the Afghan border, where bored and anxious Russian soldiers are preparing to return home.


https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/28/goya-paintings-many-not-work-of-spanish-master-studio-assistants
http://rengetsu.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01I7ul0iL8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXJm3qyjVrc