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November 4, 2009 - January 10, 2010
Au fil du Dit du Genji (Threading the Genji-Monogatari) is an exhibition set among the Museum collections, built around the gift of the Master weaver Itaro Yamaguchi (1901 -2007), displayed in his honor in the Chinese and Japanese collections of the Guimet Museum.
Exhibition curators: Hélène Bayou, chief curator, Japan section at Guimet Museum, and Aurélie Samuel, registrar and assistant curator, Textiles section at Guimet Museum.
Consultant: Akira Nonaka.
The “Tale of the Genji” (Genji Monogatari), written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of honor at the imperial court of Heian (now Kyoto), is one of the most important iconographic sources in Japan. A mainstay of Japanese imagination, the novel, written a thousand years ago, has crossed the ages and cultures to join the universal literary patrimony, thanks its extreme refinement and modernity...
It has spawned the Genji-e (the “pictures of Genji”), a pictorial movement in itself. Depicted on all sorts of media - scrolls, albums, foiled screens, fans, kakemonos - and in various styles, the Genji-e allows the novel to be read as a figurative expression.
To reproduce the painted scenes from Genji Monogatari or “Tale of Genji”, dating from the Heian Period (794-1185) and kept at the Museum of Nagoya and Tokyo museum Goto in weaving, Master Itarô Yamaguchi, born of a family of silk weavers in the Nishijin district of Kyoto and honoured in this exhibition, used the Jacquard loom. Invented in Lyons, introduced in Japan during the Meiji era (1868-1912), it revolutionized the art of weaving both in Europe and Asia.
As requested by the Master and his son, Mr. Nonaka, four scrolls will be displayed at the Guimet Museum and presented together for the first time in France. They are a priceless enrichment for the institution and represents, in the words of Master Yamaguchi, "a living history of the art of weaving”.
A collection of preparatory drawings, some mounted on screens, others on kakemono, but also paintings, kimonos and obi from the same workshop and works held at the Guimet Museum, illustrating the Genji Monogatari, from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, will be displayed alongside the works, to give the visitor a view as complete as possible of the length of the Genji-inspired iconography.
Translation : Rémy Goavec, Writer and reporter.
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