Essays, Exhortations, and Errata

There is an urgent need for a byobu-e (Japanese folding screen painting) database, global in scale.  Tens of thousands, perhaps  more, of hand-painted, one of a kind byobu screens, in Japan and the rest of the world (particularly in North America and Europe, but also in Asia and Latin America), are unregistered in any form, nor any assurance that photographic images of those artworks will be preserved for posterity. 

A fraction of them can be gleaned in architectural magazines and auction listings; most are in private homes or stacked in art and antique shops, often unphotographed and sold to private individuals, after which no systematic means of keeping track of them exists.

The tremendous variety of imagery contained in these byobu-e is of great artistic and art-historical value.  There are conceptions contained in some of the them, that the author has seen in antique shops or in homes of ill-informed owners who have come upon them by chance or inheritance, of the likes this author has never seen in museums.  And which, if nothing is done, may very well become part of our irrecoverable, lost heritage of historic images, images of a kind we will have no inkling of that they ever existed, once gone.  Many of the older byobu-e (18th century or earlier) have been duly recorded.  It is the vast number of 19th century and early 20th century byobu that have not, which require the most attention.  

As part of the database, photographs of the byobu standing zigzag front and back, as well as completely flattened out, and the frame fittings, would be ideal.  Accompanied, of course, with all the usual measurements and biographic information.    

Too much attention has been paid to photographic records of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, of which databases, books, and reprints abound.  It is time to focus on the byobu-e of which so surprisingly few comprehensive monographs exist (those that do have at most a hundred or so examples); and also one day, the kakejiku (hanging scroll) painting, though these are so numerous as to present a seemingly overwhelming task.