University professors Sylvan Barnet and William Burto were rummaging in a New York gallery for Korean celadons 40 years ago when they happened on the eye-popping “God of Medicine and Wine” calligraphy by Jiun Onko, an 18th-century Japanese Buddhist monk.
“Its black-and-white dynamism drew us right away,” says Mr. Barnet. “We were into ceramics at the time, but Jiun’s powerful scroll led us to collecting Japanese Buddhist calligraphy in a big way.”
Forty-eight wonderful objects from the art collection of the two professors are on display, along with 10 writings belonging to the Freer Gallery of Art, in “Faith and Form: Selected Calligraphy and Painting From the Japanese Religious Traditions,” now at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
“The quality and variety of calligraphies in the collection is unrivaled in the United States,” says exhibit organizer Ann Yonemura, senior associate curator of Japanese art at the Freer and Sackler galleries.
Visitors will sense the energy and passion the collectors put into amassing rarities such as the tiny, gleaming “Buddha at Birth (Tanjo Butso)” from the 7th century. The statue, one of the most significant early Japanese gilt bronze figures, is, fittingly, the first object displayed in the show.
Surrounding the Buddha are “sutras,” the carefully written, elaborately decorated Buddhist religious texts from the 8th-century Nara period. Calligraphers would later embellish the sutras even more lavishly in succeeding periods, which are featured in the next gallery.
Expressionistic, powerful calligraphies later written by Zen Buddhist monks are found in the last galleries. Though the last to be written and the last in the exhibit, these works were the first to attract Mr. Barnet and Mr. Burto in the 1960s.
“Much of collecting is visceral, and initially we were attracted to these more flamboyant writings,” Mr. Barnet said at the press preview for the exhibit. “The expressionistic calligraphies are easier to like, like our Jiuns exhibited here.”
Both collectors are Harvard University-trained scholars of English literature and theater. Perhaps it was inevitable that they were drawn to an art of words and that within this art they concentrated on the most theatrical.
Calligraphy, closely related to the arts of poetry and painting, was considered the highest of the arts in China and Japan, as it was supposed to reveal the writer’s inner spiritual being.
Miss Yonemura dramatically placed the professors’ initial purchase, the tall, vertical-hanging Jiun — the “God of Medicine and Wine” — on one wall with four other Jiun hanging scrolls nearby. She wanted the strengths of each to reinforce one another.
The curator explains that Jiun often compressed his characters at the scroll’s lowest edge when he ran out of space.
“Jiun bore down hard on the paper with a big brush to write with split hairs and to divide the hairs of the brush for what’s called ’the flying white writing technique,’” Miss Yonemura says.
His nearby “Circle” is more contemplative, as the exhibit label explains. The scroll’s upper part asks, “How many people can pass through?” The circle form, with no understandable beginning or end, has many meanings in Zen Buddhism. It was also believed that the repeated brushing of circles in ink eventually led the writer to enlightenment.
Not to be missed in the group is Jiun’s roughly brushed “Bodhidharma” monk. He was regarded by Edo-period, Japanese Buddhists as the Indian monk who brought Buddhism to Japan. He was also revered as the first Zen patriarch to meditate continuously for nine years.
The exhibition is divided into two distinct parts, with the early, meticulously drawn sutras in the first galleries and the later expressionist, individualistic writings in the last galleries. Miss Yonemura and Sackler/Freer exhibition designer Karen Yamamoto astutely used intense colors of plum purple and brilliant saffron to clarify the division. The dramatic spotlighting of Buddhist objects in the dark purple galleries is most effective in creating a mystical ambience.
Eventually, Mr. Barnet and Mr. Burto turned to the earlier calligraphies to understand how the later ones began. “It took awhile for us to like them rather than the expressive ones,” Mr. Barnet says. “But then we were drawn to the magic of the repeated characters in the Chinese ’Regular Script’ which is, indeed, very regular.”
One such calligraphy is the elegant, Nara-period “Section of the Lotus Sutra, Chapter 27” of gold letters brushed onto a vividly dyed purple paper. Miss Yonemura says this sutra, along with others in the first gallery, was intended to transmit the teachings of the historic Buddha and tell stories of his early life.
Buddhists of the time appreciated the clearly legible square characters written in regular vertical formats as seen in this “Sutra.” The letters had to be balanced and clearly proportioned.
Calligraphies in the following Heian period (794-1185) became more and more lavish, as seen in the indigo blue-dyed “Lotus Sutra, Chapters 20-23.” Scenes from a ceremonial dance, reminiscent of the period’s sensuous painting, decorate the frontispiece.
Visitors to this special, challenging exhibit will be thankful that Mr. Barnet and Mr. Buto had a lucky accident in that New York gallery.
WHAT: “Faith and Form: Selected Calligraphy and Painting From the Japanese Religious Traditions”
WHERE: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Avenue SW
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily through July 18
TICKETS: Free
PHONE: 202/633-1000
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