Kegon-fu
About This Series
Kegon-fu, which may be translated as Songs of the Avatamsaka or Pantheon of the Flower Garland Sutra, is one of Shiko Munakata's principal Buddhist print cycles, drawn from the cosmology of the Kegon-kyo, the Mahayana scripture whose vision of an infinitely interpenetrating universe of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and worlds offered the artist a sustaining iconographic source from the late 1930s onward. The Kegon sutra and its key narrative section, the Gandavyuha or pilgrimage of the youth Sudhana, supplied Munakata with the figural pantheon he carved into cherry blocks throughout his mature career: ranks of bodhisattvas, gods, kings, and guardians who in the sutra appear successively to instruct the young seeker. Working in his ita-e manner, with the block cut directly in yamazakura cherry and printed in sumi on washi, Munakata translated each pantheon figure into a frontal, near-iconic image set against densely carved ground, often inscribed with the figure's name in his idiosyncratic seal-script calligraphy. The cycle belongs to the wartime and immediate postwar phase of Munakata's career, when his evacuation to Fukumitsu in Toyama Prefecture brought him into closer contact with the priests of the True Pure Land temples that supported his religious work, and the title Kegon-fu signals his deliberate ambition to set the sutra to print as a composer might set a text to music. Impressions of subjects from the Kegon-fu cycle are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Munakata holdings of other major American museums.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Kegon-fu, which may be translated as Songs of the Avatamsaka or Pantheon of the Flower Garland Sutra, is one of Shiko Munakata's principal Buddhist print cycles, drawn from the cosmology of the Kegon-kyo, the Mahayana scripture whose vision of an infinitely interpenetrating universe of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and worlds offered the artist a sustaining iconographic source from the late 1930s onward. The Kegon sutra and its key narrative section, the Gandavyuha or pilgrimage of the youth Sudhana, supplied Munakata with the figural pantheon he carved into cherry blocks throughout his mature career: ranks of bodhisattvas, gods, kings, and guardians who in the sutra appear successively to instruct the young seeker. Working in his ita-e manner, with the block cut directly in yamazakura cherry and printed in sumi on washi, Munakata translated each pantheon figure into a frontal, near-iconic image set against densely carved ground, often inscribed with the figure's name in his idiosyncratic seal-script calligraphy. The cycle belongs to the wartime and immediate postwar phase of Munakata's career, when his evacuation to Fukumitsu in Toyama Prefecture brought him into closer contact with the priests of the True Pure Land temples that supported his religious work, and the title Kegon-fu signals his deliberate ambition to set the sutra to print as a composer might set a text to music. Impressions of subjects from the Kegon-fu cycle are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Munakata holdings of other major American museums.
The Kegon-fu series contains 2 prints, created by Shiko Munakata.
The Kegon-fu series was created by Shiko Munakata (棟方志功).
We currently have 2 of 2 known prints from the Kegon-fu series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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