Passion (Aizen)

Passion (愛染, Aizen) is a 1934 painting by Kawabata Ryūshi held by the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture. The picture, at 168.2 by 168.5 centimeters in mineral pigments on silk, takes its title from Aizen Myōō, the esoteric Buddhist deity of passion and love whose red-skinned, multi-armed iconography Ryūshi quotes in the painting's flame imagery. The composition pairs flowering autumn maple branches in deep crimson with a pair of mandarin ducks at rest in still water below — a classic kachō-e (bird-and-flower) pairing of motifs traditionally associated with mated devotion — and translates it into the registers of Buddhist passion and natural-world spectacle that interested Ryūshi throughout the 1930s. The Adachi Museum, opened in 1980 to house the personal collection of the businessman Adachi Zenkō, is now one of the principal venues for the study of twentieth-century nihonga and holds significant works by Yokoyama Taikan, Takeuchi Seihō, Kawai Gyokudō, and Ryūshi among others; its Japanese-garden setting makes Aizen one of the best-known Ryūshi paintings in any public collection.