Bamboo in Fine Weather after Rain, mid-1700s. Ike Taiga (Japanese, 1723-1776). Two-panel folding screen; ink on paper; image: x cm (64 1/4 x 71 7/8 in.). As this two-fold byøbu demonstrates, Taiga ranks among the most creative painters of the Edo period. By sheer industry and with unfettered talent, in three and one-half decades he produced an oeuvre exceeding one thousand compositions, in various formats. While he was unencumbered by a traditional education in the classical literature and philosophy of Chinese civilization, he nevertheless gravitated toward standard themes. He wa

Bamboo in Fine Weather after Rain, mid-1700s. Ike Taiga (Japanese, 1723-1776). Two-panel folding screen; ink on paper; image: x cm (64 1/4 x 71 7/8 in.). As this two-fold byøbu demonstrates, Taiga ranks among the most creative painters of the Edo period. By sheer industry and with unfettered talent, in three and one-half decades he produced an oeuvre exceeding one thousand compositions, in various formats. While he was unencumbered by a traditional education in the classical literature and philosophy of Chinese civilization, he nevertheless gravitated toward standard themes. He was familiar with native painting themes and techniques, but his circle--fellow artists, writers, and intellectuals--all favored the cultural realm of the artist-scholar grounded in Chinese studies. Skilled with brush and ink, and a consummate professional, Taiga had begun supporting himself and his widowed mother while he was still a teenager. Their livelihood depended on the sale of his pictures and calligraphy executed in a variety of stylistic modes. But since most of his customers during his mature years considered themselves learned and sophisticated in their aesthetic choices, Taiga's production conformed basically to the eighteenth-century taste in Kyoto for so-called literati-style paintings and subjects. This byøbu suggests the powerful aspects of Taiga's art: visual disjunctions, wildly disproportionate assemblages of natural and man-made forms close to one another, and a surprising tonal "coolness." Indeed, the natural prospect here is fundamentally at odds with so-called Western reality, but it has a peculiar kinship with a contemporary Western aesthetic that savors discon-nected imagery and formal tensions. Taiga's view of landscape here is highly eccentric, featuring summary land masses that look so fragmented they seem to be in a state following collapse. Yet nestled to the side of the mountain peak in a grove of gigantic bamboo appears a cluster of thatched hut

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