Kinky Kimonos Galore

Just don’t be a ‘sour-lemon eater,’ or you’ll miss the fun at the Worcester Art Museum.

I went to Boston last week to see the Monet in Boston exhibition, the Museum of Fine Arts 150th anniversary show, and to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. On the way home to ye olde Arlington in Vermont, I made a long, joyous stop at the Worcester Art Museum. The Kimono in Print: 300 Years of Japanese Design is its new show. It looks beautiful, is very educational, and it’s saucy. Who knew I’d find sex ’n’ style, proven winners, in Worcester?

Here’s a plot twist in today’s museum narrative. Worcester is a distinguished museum and pure pleasure unpolluted by introductory videos, a supersized shop, and miles of hallways before we see art. Art’s there, straight away, in a gracious, dignified old courtyard, and it’s The Worcester Hunt — the massive, colorful Justinian-era floor mosaic. Wild animals and hunters gracefully cavort in Byzantine debauch.

The museum isn’t big, but each gallery shows some unexpected wonder, from Japan, China, or Mesoamerica, the Italy and Holland of the Old Masters, France of the Impressionists, or the America of Copley and Revere.

And hissy consternation and grievance are almost entirely absent from the arrangement of art and the wall texts. The museum is old-fashioned. It’s scented with old WASP money mostly spent, a scent, alas, I know well, so it’s well-worn in most places and needing a good spiffing up in one or two. The place is resolutely all about art through the ages, not the nutty grudges of today.

And now, it’s about kimonos, courtesans, kabuki rakes, naughty books, and color so sumptuous, you’ll lick your plate clean.

“Kimono” means “thing to wear,” and until around 1600 it was the uniform of commoners, made of cotton and unadorned. Then and now, it’s a straight-seamed garment cut into a collar, two sleeves, two panels covering front and back and supported by the shoulders, and a gusset that wraps around the body. Like Chanel’s little black dress, it’s essential beauty.

The rich originally wore kimonos as underwear. Then, early in the Edo period — a golden age for Japanese culture, stability, and prosperity starting in 1603 — the kimono went external and high style. Initially, as a fashion statement, it must have been a radical as well as telling moment. As the old samurai aristocracy faded in power and wealth, a new, affluent bourgeois class developed, and fuddy-duddy was out. I compare it to the end of the corset.

The kimono is basic. It’s a canvas inviting embellishment. Patterns are infinite. The check and the vertical line were new design features introduced in the 1600s by Portuguese traders, who, though termed “southern barbarians,” sparked a rage that never ended. Unlike static dressing traditions, the kimono, then and now, isn’t confining or heavily layered. Its sweeping curves were seen in the 1600s as liberating but, at the same time, the kimono concealed as well as revealed.

Style was to be harvested in many new places, and not only from the underwear drawer. The newest fashion icons were high-end courtesans and heartthrob actors from the kabuki stage. Kabuki theaters and licensed prostitution districts overlapped, and their stars were of deep fascination to people who saw themselves as “au courant.” “Ukiyo-e” artists such as Hishikawa Moronobu chronicled the styles of courtesans, customers, and actors in lifestyle magazines that were mostly images rather than text. New Designs of Fresh Young Leaves was a series in the late 1770s depicting courtesans and the latest kimono and hairstyle designs.

The show’s not chronological but thematic, with enticing themes first. Yoyoyama, a famous courtesan, appears in an 1830 print with her two young female attendants in resplendent finery as they parade down a street in cherry-blossom time.

The Kimono in Print is about fashion, to be sure, but it’s rare in that it’s a study of the history of books, and rude ones at that. In the 1660s, the “shunpon” appeared. It’s plush, expensive pornography and at the cutting edge of commercial book production in Japan not only in content but in design and production values. There are examples in the show. They’re the most refined use of color woodblock printing, with as many as eight blocks used to get a rich, detailed image. Paper needed to be thick to take the pressure. Pigments were the best of their kind.

“Shunpon” such as Poem of the Pillow and Album of the Cuckoo were marketed as luxury goods to porn aficionados. As books for rich, advanced thinkers, for epicures, the latest kimono fashions were important. This isn’t New York pier sex, and the women are, remember, courtesans, not fly-by-night hookers.

I focused not on the sex, which neither shocked nor illuminated me, but on the kimonos, the bedding, furniture, food, and porcelain, all thoroughly luxe. The artists piled detail upon detail. The richly patterned kimonos are flexed, angular, or limp as the bodies moved. Colors are supersaturated. Figures are flat. There’s no depth or shadows. There’s no tradition of the voluptuous nude in Japanese art as there is in, say, Italian art. Still, it’s randy stuff. Body parts are anatomically precise, startlingly detailed, and sometimes magnified in case a viewer forgot his glasses.

The illustrated books were sequenced, with the first images and storyline a “getting to know you” moment. With each page, the “let me show you my etchings” moment evolves into “let’s get comfortable,” “let’s get cozy,” and, then, “let’s get nasty,” with each step showing different angles of the latest kimono style. Courtesans did wear undergarments, adding spice to a visual narrative that Gypsy Rose Lee would envy.

There was no religious or ethical objection in Edo-period Japan to showing aroused genitalia or any number of sex acts in print. A samurai or two might complain that these images distracted from duties in life, like being a devoted son. They were widely and thoroughly dismissed as “sour-lemon eaters.” That’s my new favorite way to describe a range of today’s yappers and dullards.

It’s a fashion show, and a book show, but those are merely among its dimensions. The Kimono in Print is about the dissemination of new fashions, so it’s a mass-media show, too. There’s great material on the history of the fashion magazine in Japan. “Kosode hinagatabon” were practical pattern books that tailors used but, as periodicals, were sold in urban bookshops and were the closest thing to Vogue. They promoted new patterns and techniques, so tailors used them, too.

A 1719 issue showed a fashionably dressed mother and her two daughters leafing through the latest pattern book. “What an unusual design,” big sis observes. Mom encourages. “Look for what you like.” Little sis declares, “Let’s go with that one.” There are many peeks like this in the book and show, making us feel we’re seeing the fashion business and the marketing business develop together.

These publications treated celebrity lifestyles, too, like today’s Vanity Fair. Many of the actors portrayed were stars. Kabuki Actors’ Boating Party, from 1797, shows three well-known and dressed-to-the-nines actors lounging on the shore of a lake resort while curious middle-class fans cruise by to sneak a peek.

This is one of many delightful, scrumptious moments in the show. In Courtesan as Rin Reiso, from 1710, a vamp courtesan sips sake, inhales cunningly, and exhales in the form of a boat taking a man to a bordello. An early street scene, In Front of the Takashiyama, from the 1680s, shows a samurai, disguised by a big straw hat, looking at courtesans arrayed behind a big window. He’s not supposed to be there, but he is. Yoshiwara Client, from the 1740s, suggests a bisexual three-way.

Though the kimono’s basic form doesn’t change, colors and decoration do. Tie-dying was one innovation. Checks and stripes were big foreign incursions and also big hits. Embroidery and gold leaf enriched the highest-quality kimonos. In the 1800s, sensational visual effects slowly surrendered to softer, painterly surfaces featuring birds, flowers, and leaves. This is one of the nicest parts of the show, nice in terms of less randy but also in its subtle beauty. Imagery showed an exacting interest in nature. Colors aren’t as saturated. Textile print technologies allowed nuanced gradations of color. It’s as if Japonism came to Japan!

The exhibition is a partnership between Worcester and Chiso, the 455-year-old Kyoto maker of couture kimonos and Buddhist vestments. Originally planned as a retrospective of Chiso’s production, it became yet another casualty of the COVID crisis. Worcester is entrepreneurial. It tweaked the show to feature its prints, developed the media and porn themes, and, I assume, made it fit into one big gallery.

Chiso is still a component. There’s a nice online exhibition focused on Chiso, accessible on the museum website. I enjoyed it. Chiso also designed and made a kimono especially for the show. It’s gorgeous and looms in the center of the gallery like Venus de Milo and shows that the clothed body is, usually, sexier than the nude one. It’s a work of art and called “The Worcester Kimono.” It’s decorated in stylized maple leaves and undulating hills. Worcester is in New England, yes, but I never thought of it as a hill town. Evidently, it has seven.

Chiso’s motto is “Straight to Beauty,” which leaps beyond what’s a fad or what’s modern and emphasizes our natural quest for beauty as a feature that makes us mortals unique. Chiso’s is family-owned and in its 15th generation, so beauty’s in their blood.

I want to write a bit about the museum. It opened in 1898 and was very much the project of Worcester’s social and economic elites. Then, the place was an industrial powerhouse whose products and business interests traversed the globe, and its elites wanted Worcester’s museum to embrace both East and West and every age of human creativity.

An early gift of 3,000 Japanese “ukiyo-e” woodblock prints made it the center for the study of Japanese art and the Japonism movement. This bequest was from John Chandler Bancroft, an eminent lawyer and judge from Worcester who fell in love with Japonism while a young man visiting Paris in the 1860s. His collection was the best outside Japan. It stimulates the kimono show, which is a wise use of a permanent collection and economically efficient.

Separate bequests of Old Master prints and early-American portraits and silver established these areas as troves of national importance. In the 1930s, the museum supported archaeological digs in what was ancient Antioch. The Worcester Hunt was among the haul it shared with the other sponsors.

Those were the days. Discerning directors and curators bought well in unplowed fields, at least among rich collectors, like Mesoamerican art and photography. Baroque and Mannerist painting was once cheap, too, and often overlooked. El Greco’s Repentant Magdalen, from 1577, came to Worcester in 1922, only a few years after El Greco’s rediscovery. It’s worth a trip to Worcester in itself. Dutch art is a strength, too. The museum stalled when it came to the work of living artists, whose work was beyond the comfort level of trustees. It’s adding some good things now.

Worcester has been short on cash for as long as I can remember. The city, once packed to the gills with industry and banks, joined a small army of New England cities on the post-war skids. Once the heart of Massachusetts’s industrial core, Worcester was eclipsed by Boston. Its old WASP aristocracy disappeared, either through death or Baby Boomers who moved, and with it went the museum’s donor base. Many of the grandees were generous with gifts of art and money.

There’s the true-blue WASP in religion and heritage. That WASP, my father often said, could be one of those WASPs who “was a skinflint prick” or “was a spendthrift prick.” “Stupid” and “putz” sometimes were in the mix. These tangent brands, when they served on boards, didn’t give but also didn’t mind digging into museum capital to run the place. The museum might have had experience with these, and I’m being diplomatic because I know it did. Certainly it spent a boatload on art, buying great things by Monet, Gauguin, Gainsborough, and Piero di Cosimo in the Teens and ’20s. And digs in Antioch don’t come cheap.

I suspect the endowment was, as in the case of the Gardner in Boston, too invested in bonds. All of these elements make for a museum with restricted endowments, including those for acquisitions, but very little unrestricted money and a small cadre of rich locals hit for money by Worcester’s many hospitals, private colleges, churches, theaters, symphony, botanical garden, and the American Antiquarian Society.

If there’s a museum that’s needy and worthy, it’s Worcester. It’s gotten some big gifts of money recently. It has also added a new, intriguing glory. The museum now owns the contents of the Higgins Armory, the largest and best collection of arms and armor in America, aside from the Met’s. It includes gladiator and ancient Greek helmets, everything you’ll need for jousting, battle armor, and guns galore. John Woodman Higgins was an industrialist living in Worcester and passionate about armor. Accommodating this trove is a challenge, but it’ll make the museum a destination for kids and Second Amendment purists.

The American decorative-arts gallery needs — desperately needs — an overhaul, but that’s not a criticism. Everyone knows that, and the museum can’t print money like the creeps in Congress. At some point, it will get a big gift and put its superb furniture and Revere silver with the old American portraits.

Matthias Waschek has been the director since 2011. He’s very good. He certainly has flair. A few years ago, he managed to get everyone in the museum to agree to reopen the original museum entrance, which flows directly into the courtyard and The Worcester Hunt. This entrance was shut when the museum built an ugly, modern addition and a new entrance that looks like a hospital lobby and makes the visitor feel not like a prince but like a patient with an appointment for a colonoscopy.

“Open up this door,” Waschek declared to the TV cameras as the old, creaky, but splendid doors opened. It was, museum-wise, a “tear down this wall” moment, since grand old entrances hadn’t yet come back in style.

Jim Welu was the director for many years and a role model for me. Charles Sawyer, one of my predecessors as director of the Addison Gallery, ruled the museum in the ’40s before he ran the art gallery at Yale and introduced modern architecture to the university. Francis Henry Taylor was the director in the ’30s before he went to direct the Met. The place has a history of smart, visionary directors that continues today.

In the American portrait galleries, some portraits had new, annoying, and altogether silly “gotcha labels” where the poor, dead subject had some, however remote or spurious, connection to slavery.

Thomas Smith’s self-portrait from about 1680 is nothing to write home about in looks, but it’s the first self-portrait known in America. Trifling with it is a sin. Smith was a ship captain, too. “The artist’s biography is difficult to determine,” we learn, “since at least three mariners named Thomas Smith lived in the Boston area in the late 17th century.” Behind one of these three curtains, we’re told, is an evil slaveholder, but we don’t know which. Gilbert Stuart painted Russell Sturgis’s portrait in 1822. His brothers-in-law owned slaves in Santo Domingo. Sturgis’s son died in a shipwreck while heading to Santo Domingo. Bang . . . the picture’s got a finger-pointing label.

This is tiresome and anal. Unless this label strategy is uniform throughout the museum, it makes no sense. The museum needs to interrogate its Italian and Dutch artists, its exploitive English and French aristocrats of whom it has many portraits, and Greeks, Romans, and Mesoamericans who, while unknown, were hardly sensitive, evolved yuppies à la Upper West Side. Unless it does this, it’s dumb to target only the American portraits. Worcester’s director once proclaimed, “Open up this door.” I proclaim, “Take down these labels.”

I had the best time and recommend the museum as an experience of the highest quality.