Green Waves

Green Waves is a pair of six-panel folding screens by Tsuji Kakō dated to about 1910, executed in ink, color, and gold on paper, now in the Seattle Art Museum. The composition is one of his most distinctive surviving works: a sweeping pattern of stylized wave forms unfolding across the twelve combined panels against a softly gold-toned ground, deploying simultaneously the wave conventions of the Rinpa decorative tradition (Ogata Kōrin's famous Waves at Matsushima and the long Edo-period vocabulary of wave-screens descending from it), the atmospheric color of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition in which Kakō had been trained under Kōno Bairei, and the late-Meiji and Taishō taste for ambitious nihonga decoration at architectural scale. The chromatic key — greens, soft golds, restrained outline — gives the work the contemplative, low-key quality that distinguishes Kakō's painting from the more saturated decorative idioms of his contemporaries, while the formal control of the curving wave-bands across the pair of screens demonstrates his command of the byōbu format as a vehicle for serious decorative invention. The work entered the Seattle Art Museum's significant Asian art collection in the twentieth century and is one of the most often-cited of his decorative paintings.