Continuing the celebration of Japan Society’s 110th anniversary, Japan Society Gallery is pleased to announce the spring 2018 exhibition A Giant Leap: The Transformation of Hasegawa Tōhaku, commemorating the life and artistic legacy of Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539—1610), one of Japan’s most beloved painters, artistic innovators and founder of the 16th-century Hasegawa school of painting. For the first time in a New York City venue, visitors will have an unparalleled opportunity to experience more than ten of Tōhaku’s most celebrated works in a single space, including four Important Cultural Properties from Japanese collections.

A Giant Leap will convey the dramatic transformation of a painter from the provinces into one of Japan’s most important and beloved artists. The exhibition will take as its point of departure a little known but extremely important screen by Tōhaku, currently in a private U.S. collection, which depicts birds, trees, and striated rocks emerging from breaks in expansive gilt clouds. Current scholarly research has identified this masterpiece with the pivotal moment in the artist’s career, marked by a radical change in his painting style and echoed by a transformation in his nomenclature from “Nobuharu” to “Tōhaku”. Owing to their rarity and in order to preserve their remarkable condition, the screens and scroll paintings will be displayed in two rotations, March 9—April 8, 2018 and April 12—May 6, 2018.

A Giant Leap will not only call attention to Tōhaku’s achievements by focusing on his artistic transformation, but the exhibition will also raise critical questions about his ambition as a contemporary artist in early modern Japanese society from a historical perspective. Within a centuries-old tradition of artistic training, how was Nobuharu/Tōhaku able to refashion his style so dramatically over the course of his career? By viewing the exhibited masterworks from this vantage point, A Giant Leap will offer a platform for considering Japan’s transition into the Early Modern period, as expressed in the visual arts.

“We are thrilled to stage this momentous exhibition of rare works by Hasegawa Tōhaku. In many ways, the exhibition exemplifies Japan Society’s unique capability to provide a window onto Eastern scholarship, acquiring Important Cultural Properties from Japan and presenting them in a single exhibition in New York City. As many of the loans are previously unseen in the West, A Giant Leap is an opportunity for Tōhaku’s genius to be recognized at an international level that has not yet been achieved in the U.S.,” said Yukie Kamiya, director of Japan Society Gallery.

Tōhaku has been the subject of renewed attention in recent years, including at the Kyoto National Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, where the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death was commemorated in an important 2010 survey exhibition. Raised in a family of cloth-dyers in Nanao, on the Sea of Japan coast in the Hokuriku region of Japan’s main island, Tōhaku began his career as a provincial painter of Buddhist paintings, working under the name “Nobuharu”. He later moved to Kyoto, the heart of late 16th-century Japanese politics and culture, where he studied Chinese and Japanese painting and accepted instruction from Kanō Shōei, head of the Kanō school, which supplied paintings to Japan’s leading samurai. In the 1580s, he appears to have begun using the name “Tōhaku,” a switch in nomenclature that coincided with a shift in his style.

While producing painted screens covered in vast expanses of gold leaf, Tōhaku also began to demonstrate a mastery of sumi-e (ink painting) at this stage in his career. By 1590, he had emerged as the leading painter of his day, founding his own school of painting—the Hasegawa school—consisting primarily of his own sons. Tōhaku became the favored painter for Sen no Rykyu and the powerful daimyō Toyotomi Hideyoshi and, at the turn of the 17th-century, he was summoned to the new capital of Edo by Hideyoshi’s successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu (founder of Tokugawa shogunate), where he remained briefly until his death.

The exhibition is conceived and supervised by Dr. Miyeko Murase (Professor Emerita, Art History and Archaeology Department, Columbia University and former special consultant for Japanese Art, Asia Department, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) with Dr. Masatomo Kawai (professor emeritus, Keio University and director, Chiba City Museum of Art) in consultation with Yukie Kamiya, director of Japan Society Gallery.

In conjunction with this exhibition, a 96-page cagalogue with full-color reproductions will be published by Japan Society. Essays will be contributed by Dr. Miyeko Murase and Dr. Masatomo Kawai and entries by Masato Matsushima (curator, Tokyo National Museum), Professor Matthew McKelway (Columbia University), and Hiroyoshi Tazawa (chief curator, Tokyo National Museum).