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Ogata Kenzan
Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743) was
the most celebrated ceramist in the history of Japanese art. He
created a new style of painterly ceramics that replaced in
popularity the heavily textured decorative overglaze enamels of
the Kyoto pottery master Nonomura Ninsei (c.1574-1660/66).
Kenzan was the first highly educated and cultivated
merchant-artisan to operate a ceramics workshop and the first to
use pottery as a medium for painting.
Kenzan was the scion of a famous
textile-manufacturing family in Kyoto and the younger brother of
the great Rimpa school painter Ogata Korin (1658-1716). Kenzan
and Korin sometimes worked together on pots, collaborating
especially from about 1709 until 1716, when Korin died. Korin
would assist with design and, sometimes, with painting the
ceramics themselves. In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's
set of twelve plates, however, it was probably an academic Kano
school painter, Yamaguchi Soken, rather than a Rimpa painter who
executed the paintings. Unlike his flamboyant brother, Kenzan
was a scholarly recluse whose study of classical poetry and more
meditative manner of design is revealed in the Plates of the
Twelve Months.
In 1696, Kenzan opened his own
pottery studio at Narutaki near Kyoto. There, he experimented
with form, design, and glazes, re-creating popular Japanese and
foreign ceramic types of slightly earlier times. Kenzan's
chief involvement in production was most likely managerial, but
he occasionally painted or inscribed choice pieces. By 1712, in
financial difficulty, Kenzan moved the pottery studio to a
workshop district in central Kyoto. There, surrounded by
printers, lacquerers, and armorers, he prospered. Kenzan's
exquisite ceramics have been influential to the present day, and
"Kenzan Ware" is still produced in Kyoto.
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