Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses a compendium of paintings (mekuri) that once served as room decoration and was re-organized into a model collection in Berlin. It facilitates a glimpse at the understudied field of nineteenth-century visual culture and a reflection of collector's impact on artworks' materiality.

Paper long abstract:

In 1879, the diplomat Max von Brandt (1835-1920) sold a large compendium of paintings on paper from Japan to the Prussian state, who assigned it to the Ornamentstichsammlung held at the Königliches Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin. Though enumerated and described image by image in 1879, it was transferred to the Kunstbibliothek as a compendium with the general lot number 07.2181 in 1907. After World War II, it finally entered the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin. Only few of the 139 sheets have been exhibited in the more than 130 years since the paintings first entered a collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The paintings, which once served as room decoration, were reorganized repeatedly during this time and lastly regrouped according to size, format, and artist. Inventory numbers of all three holding institutions reflect different systems of understanding, organizing and storing the compendium of paintings detached from screens or sliding doors (mekuri).

The paintings of different formats surprise with a rich variety of subjects and a great diversity of artists from different lineages including the Sumiyoshi school, literati in succession of Tani Bunchō, Edo Rinpa artists, and artists unknown or understudied. The collection thus unfolds a network of artists either working together across workshops or compiled together in the late Tokugawa period. It allows a surprising view on the understudied field of Japanese pictorial culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The paper takes this compilation as a case study to reflect intertwined networks of producing, collecting and interpreting Japanese visual arts. It understands the compilation as an alternative art history in a nutshell that sheds light on understudied artists and fields of pictorial production in nineteenth century Japan. The paper thereby reflects art historical structures of organizing visual art discursively in processes of canonization, and materially through collecting and reorganizing artistic materials.