Flaming Grass (Sōen)

Flaming Grass (草炎, Sōen) is a 1930 painting by Kawabata Ryūshi held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The picture, a long horizontal composition in gold and dark ink, depicts a field of summer grass rendered as if catching fire from within — the title playing on the way grasses lit by an evening sun appear to burn against a darkening sky. Ryūshi takes a familiar Rinpa-school motif (the grass-painting tradition stretching from Sōtatsu through Kōrin to Hōitsu) and converts it from a decorative screen device into a stand-alone painting at architectural scale, with mineral pigments handled in broad flat planes against a metallic ground in a manner deliberately calibrated to be read from across a large exhibition hall. The work was painted in the year after he founded the Seiryūsha (Blue Dragon Society) and exemplifies the early high period of his self-described kaijō geijutsu, 'exhibition-hall art': painting designed as a public statement rather than as an alcove ornament. Its acquisition by the National Museum of Modern Art makes it one of the principal Ryūshi works in the Japanese national collection.