From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
There are only a handful of museum spaces that can be truly described as meditative, offering visitors a quiet respite from the hustle of a busy institution, among historically important and aesthetically impressive objects. The Japanese Buddhist Temple Room at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is not only one of the best loved in the United States, it is one of the oldest, built as part of the museum’s original Beaux Arts home on Huntington Avenue, which opened in 1909. Based on the designs of an 8th-century monastic complex in Hōryūji, the room’s dark wooden columns and coffered ceiling create a warm but secluded surrounding, while open-work lanterns cast a hypnotic flicker above. You can sit in a thinly padded niche along one wall to take in the seven large-scale Buddhist sculptures installed on the opposite side and on either end of the room – or just be alone with your thoughts for a minute.
‘People have such strong memories of this place,’ says Anne Nishimura Morse, the museum’s senior curator of Japanese art. The space is so special that when the Temple Room and the MFA’s adjoining Japanese art galleries reopened to the public this May, after an extended six-year renovation, monks from the Miidera temple in Japan travelled to Boston to rededicate it with ritual chanting. But the visitors who have come to see the new galleries since then likely have not noticed the updates made to the Temple Room, which have been largely behind the scenes, improving the lighting, security system, fireproofing and ventilation. ‘It’s all very subtle, because I wanted people to feel as though we hadn’t really interfered with it,’ Morse says.
View of the Japanese Buddhist Temple Room at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
It is the sculptures in the room that have received the most attention, undergoing a thorough conservation process since 2018, which was visible to the public on site. This led to a few surprises, including finding remnants of polychrome painting on several of the pieces, and an inscription dating to 1909 inside the hollow wooden statue Bishamonten, the Guardian of the North, which was discovered with the help of a paediatric neurosurgeon from nearby Boston Children’s Hospital, using a tiny endoscope inserted into a crack between the head and shoulder. ‘We hadn’t had them so close up,’ Morse says. ‘They’re out there all the time, but looking at them in that kind of detail was fun.’ A full analysis of the work done on the sculptures can now be found on an interactive touchscreen display outside of the Temple Room, allowing visitors to zoom in on the details.
This level of multimedia context can be found throughout the new galleries. The display of Noh theatre robes, for example, is accompanied by a video featuring performers wearing similar costumes in action, while an alcove recreating a tea ceremony setting includes a video of an actual ceremony, with the quiet swish of a bamboo whisk and the careful pour of water as the only soundtrack. All of this helps bring to life the MFA’s historic Japanese art collection, which contains more than 100,000 pieces – making it the largest outside of Japan – and dates back to the museum’s earliest years.
The display of Noh theatre costumes in the Arts of Japan gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In fact, around 65 to 75 per cent of the current collection came to the museum through the effort of three men during the turn of the 20th century: Ernest Fenollosa, the museum’s first curator of Asian art, from 1890 to 1896; trustee William Sturgis Bigelow, who donated most of his 75,000 works of Japanese art to the museum in 1911; and Okakura Kakuzō, the curator of Japanese and Chinese art from 1904 until his death in 1913. Their names can be found on wall texts throughout the Japanese galleries, such as the one describing an intricately carved and assembled bronze sculpture from 1269 of Shō Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion from the Kamakura period. Originally acquired by Bigelow, the work is a remarkable example of Japanese craftsmanship, comprising 100 elements that were separately cast and then joined together – including the individual leaves of the lotus flower base – while the entire sculpture can be disassembled into 14 parts for easier transport.
The museum has continued to add to the collection, and Morse works with colleagues in the MFA’s other departments, from photography to textiles, to ensure that contemporary Japanese art is well represented across the museum. ‘We’re trying to make sure that we keep up to date,’ she says.
Women Viewing Cherry Blossoms (c. 1830–44), Tsukioka Sessai. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fenollosa-Weld Collection). Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Excursion under the Maple Leaves (c. 1830–44), Tsukioka Sessai. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fenollosa-Weld Collection). Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Reflecting this, the first object visitors will see when walking up stairs to the Japanese galleries is the contemporary sculpture Reduction, Self Portrait (2015) by the third-generation ceramicist Kondō Takahiro. Depicting the artist in a Buddha-like seated pose, the work is a response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster of 2011, with the thin tendrils of silver overglaze that crisscross his body symbolising the nuclear contamination that rained down on Japan. And the Japanese Prints gallery, which visitors enter directly after the Temple Room, opened with an exhibition pairing contemporary works with examples of ukiyo-e art from the 19th century, drawn from the MFA’s 55,000-strong collection of prints, curated by Morse’s curatorial colleague Sarah Thompson.
In November, however, that show will be replaced by an exhibition of prints relating scenes from The Tale of Genji, a classic of Japanese literature that follows the romantic trials and tribulations of a Heian-era Japanese courtier, written by the poet and noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu during the early 11th century. And it is not just the prints that will rotate in the new galleries. Paintings, screens, scrolls, miniature netsuke sculptures, tea ceremony objects and swords will all be changed on a six-month or yearly cycle, with only the large-scale sculptures remaining on permanent or semi-permanent display, allowing more of the collection to be brought out on a regular basis.
In the Arts of Japan gallery, for example, many of the works will have an autumn and winter theme, including a pair of six-panel folding screens by the early 17th-century artist Kanō Sansetsu, titled The Ten Snow Incidents, and a pair of hanging scrolls by the 19th-century artist Tsukioka Sessai, Excursion under the Maple Leaves and Women Viewing Cherry Blossoms. Selecting different genres of paintings also gives Morse the opportunity to display various mounting styles, since these are often tied to the subject matter. ‘A good mounting can emphasize different qualities in the painting,’ Morse says, giving as an example a simple vertical landscape made for the monastic community, and done only in black ink. ‘That [mounting] brings out colour, even though there isn’t any colour in the work.’
The tea ceremony display will also be switched out in November to create a more wintery tone, including a square-shaped hearth that is embedded in the floor and around which the tea utensils will be oriented. Sections of the diary of a tea master known as Matsudaira Fumai, who lived and travelled through the Matsue Domain on Japan’s western coast, will also be displayed alongside a contemporary ceramic work in icy blues and greys by the artist Mihara Ken, who is from the same region. ‘We have a large collection of ceramics, but we have only recently been able to really talk about tea, because [the ceremony] is not just about the objects, they come with provenance and accumulated histories,’ Morse says.
A recreation of a traditional tea room, with ceramics, tatami mats and an alcove, in the Arts of Japan gallery
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Most of the pieces in the MFA’s collection were acquired in the 19th century by Edward Sylvester Morse, a director of the Peabody Museum in Salem (from 1880 to 1916) with an interest in Japanese arts and culture, who wanted to find examples from every kiln that was active at the time. When an object is acquired from a tea master, however, it comes with its own narrative about previous owners and important figures that it served. ‘It picks up lore, and it’s what [the tea masters] think about the object as much as what the object itself might mean now,’ Anne Nishimura Morse adds. ‘Those kinds of stories will start coming in through the displays.’
A reinstallation also allows the museum to ensure its collection remains in good condition, which is particularly important for objects like swords and blades that need to be taken out of their scabbards, cleaned and oiled to avoid damage from dust build-up or moisture. This work is done by MFA conservator Linsly Boyer, the first woman in a Western museum charged with maintaining a sword collection. ‘It’s remarkable, because when I started at this museum [40 years ago], I was not allowed to touch the swords, because women were considered impure,’ says Morse. Now, Boyer is working with Japanese colleagues to learn the intricacies of looking after the 550 swords in the museum’s collection.
Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror (c. 1805), Katsushika Hokusai. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (William Sturgis Bigelow Collection). Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Other pieces rotated through the galleries evince how exceptional the works held by the MFA are. For example, the reopening display included Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror (c. 1805), a rare and beautiful hanging silk scroll painting from the Edo period by the artist Katsushika Hokusai, who is better known for his print-making, particularly the now universally famous Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave. November’s rehang will include a painting by the 18th-century Zen monk Hakuin Ekaku, who is credited with conceiving the ultimate koan riddle: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ As a spiritual exercise, Hakuin would paint ink portraits of Bodhidharma (Daruma), the First Patriarch of the Zen Sect, which all follow a nearly identical iconography, showing Daruma’s shaggy head, upturned eyes and robe-enveloped body in a few simple strokes. ‘It’s the expressiveness of the ink that will distinguish one painting from another,’ Morse says. ‘Ours has got wonderful brushwork.’
One work that will remain on view is a fully articulated, carved and gilded metal model of a dragon, forged during the late Edo period or early Meiji era by the artist Takaishi Shigeyoshi. Curiosities like this were created by master sword and armour makers in the late 19th century, Morse explains, since they no longer had warriors to outfit. ‘When the Japanese were starting to introduce themselves at international expositions, they wanted to be known as a country with incredible craftsmanship,’ she says. ‘So these virtuosic objects were produced.’ The two-metre-long dragon, donated to the museum in the 1960s, has become something of a social media star recently, after conservators x-rayed it to see how it worked, revealing an ingenious inner mechanism. ‘When he moves, he is just creepy,’ Morse says.
Articulated model of a dragon (second half of the 19th century), Takaishi Shigeyoshi. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of Mrs. W. Donnison Hodges. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Balancing the need to keep some well-loved and looked-for favourites on view with the desire of presenting the many historic treasures held in the MFA’s storerooms is a challenge Morse is happy to have, however. ‘There was a long period where our galleries were shut,’ she says, adding that since the year 2000, her department has organised 15 shows that have travelled to Japan, which has ensured that many of the department’s works have been seen by a wider public. ‘But in terms of our own spaces, it’s been very, very spotty,’ she says. ‘I think 2006 was the last time I had significant Japanese galleries on view.’
In the interim, the MFA has organised some special exhibitions that have kept its Japanese art in front of a Boston audience, including a Takashi Murakami show in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery in 2017 that juxtaposed the artist’s ultra-contemporary creations with historic pieces from the museum’s collection. And an exhibition about the influence of Hokusai last year proved to be one of the museum’s most popular. ‘But it’s wonderful to have our own galleries back,’ Morse says, taking in the steady flow of visitors to the space during our interview last month, ranging from college students to older couples to one small group in monastic robes led by a guide. ‘I think I’m up here almost every day, and it’s crowded.’
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.