In the first group were folding screens from the early Tokugawa period (1603–1868), with beautiful images of trees, blossoms, and animals drawn against a gold background. They were commissioned by the members of samurai and merchant classes to adorn their homes, which to the Western eye would appear quite Spartan.

The folding screens in this exhibition were produced by artists from two leading schools of Japanese painters. The Kano school's beginnings can be traced back to Kano Masanobu (1434–1530) who was active in the second half of the Muromachi period (1392–1573). Masanobu's success as a painter owed much to making Chinese-style ink painting more appealing to the ruling samurai (military) class in Japan. The school was firmly established by Masanobu's son Motonobu (1476–1559), who further adapted Chinese traditions of painting to the Japanese taste. He produced landscape and nature paintings in strong ink brush strokes and added bright colors to otherwise monochromatic ink. In doing so he fused traditional Japanese lyricism and decorative qualities to the Chinese traditions and succeeded in creating a style that was to define standard Kano features for centuries to come. The school produced many talented painters and thrived as the official painter to the shogun through the Momoyama (1573–1615) and Edo (1615–1868) periods in Japan.

The Unkoku school was started by Unkoku Togan (1547–1618) in the late sixteenth century. The name Unkoku derives from the temple where the Zen priest Sesshu (1420–1506) had his studio. Sesshu was considered the greatest suiboku (ink painting) artist of the Muromachi period. Togan adopted the name to pay homage to the great painter, and moreover, claimed for himself the title Sesshu III. Togan produced paintings that are more "naturalistic" than Sesshu, and also excelled in decorative paintings using bright colors. He competed with Hasegawa Tohaku (1539–1610), a leading artist of his time, and the well-entrenched Kano school painters for important commissions in Kyoto to produce boldly painted screens and sliding doors for the mansions of the powerful. He strove to create a distinctive Unkoku school style that would continue the Sesshu ink painting tradition and rival the leading Kano school.

The second group of objects was cloisonné enamelware (mostly vases) that was designed and created specifically for the Western market in the late nineteenth century. These types of objects were exported from Japan to Europe and the United States and were used to decorate the interior space of affluent Victorian homes. Cloisonné enameling, or enamelling into little cells, is, at its simplest, a matter of forming thin, ribbon shaped wires into a pattern, laying these narrow side uppermost onto a metal base and filling the enclosures made by the pattern with finely ground glass of differing colors. The whole is then put into a very hot furnace for a short time. As the metal becomes hot, so too does the ground glass, which melts and forms little lakes of color confined by the cloisonné wires. Provided a sufficiently high temperature is reached, the glass bonds itself to the metal base and wires. When it cools, the area can be made level and polished, with the tops of the wires showing as a delicate pattern dividing the colors one from another.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the art of cloisonné enameling, which originated in the ancient Middle East, reached its zenith of development in Japan. The Japanese craftsmen-artists pushed the technical limits of this method in order to achieve breathtaking painterly images. During the first decades of the twentieth century they surpassed, in both artistry and technical excellence, anything that had been achieved in the medium.

Yet the history of Japanese cloisonné enamelwares was as ephemeral as they were beautiful. In the form of vases, bowls, and plates they suddenly burst upon the arena of conspicuous consumption in the West, and by the 1880's they were already regarded as one of the wonders of the world. In another twenty years or so, however, they were already in decline. The height of achievement marked by the earlier craftsmen was never to be attained again, though they are still being produced in much simplified forms even today.

The purpose of this exhibit was to question the heirarchy in beauty imposed upon art objects by categorizing some as belonging to "fine" art and others to "craft". When the cloisonné wares are juxtaposed to the screen paintings, we cannot help seeing immediately the affinity between the two. We see that the so-called derivativeness of the cloisonné design is no different from the repetition of forms among the paintings in and across different schools of paintings. We also see that—if we are truthful to what our eyes tell us—the individual artistry, or the beauty, of cloisonné representation convincingly transcends any criticism of derivativeness. The depiction of images from nature in both groups equally appeals to the aesthtic sensibility of the contemporary viewers in a different way when they are artfully executed. These images are interpretations and reinterpretations of similar subject matters in different mediums, and one group is not a mere copy of the other.

The Tyler Museum of Art wishes to thank Mr. John R. Young of Dallas and Rosemarie and Leighton Longhi of New York for their generous loans to this exhibition. The Tyler Museum of Art is supported in part by the City of Tyler and Tyler Junior College. Season exhibition sponsors were Dub and B. J. Riter, the Rogers Foundation, the Wise Foundation, and the Fair Foundation.