The Samurai Come to Dallas, Cloisonné, a Spiny Lobster, and a Sake Fountain in Tow

I always love visiting Texas for its world-class art and formidable energy, personal and petroleum, and always get to the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) if time allows. During my last Texas trip, in April, I was delighted to have the time to see Samurai to the Imperial Court, a revelatory, radiant new DMA exhibition on Japanese metalwork from the late Muromachi period (1336–1573), avant-garde times, into the dynamic, Modernism-infused Meiji period (1868–1912). In our own parlous epoch, who in their right mind wouldn’t be drawn to arms and armor?

The samurai, Japan’s elite warrior class, were serious indeed about their weapons of war. “Spot-on deadly but done with style” might have been their calling card. Through 90 objects and five centuries, we sense their martial spirit and feel aesthetic chills, but elegantly crafted metal wasn’t only for the battlefield. Artists were nothing short of brilliant in making cloisonné vases, metal sculpture, incense burners, and more. Samurai’s art and scholarship are collaborative, which I like. For this superb show, the DMA worked closely with Dallas’s Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Museum, specializing in samurai art.

First of all, and the DMA has always had good curators and always does this well, you don’t have to have expertise to enter and enjoy what sounds like an esoteric exhibition about Samurai metalwork. The curators know how to interpret art with both clarity and scholarship intact. They’re serious scholars with imagination. Here, we start with a stunner, right outside the entrance to the show. It’s a head-to-toe, fully armored samurai from the middle Edo period, sometime in the 1700s, riding a partly armored fiberglass horse. This dude is so covered, he wouldn’t even get a splinter in battle. He’s heavy with iron, but it’s lacquered to look like rust. That’s early camouflage. A crescent moon tops his helmet. Small gold-lacquered leather tiles cover the horse’s torso, and the horse sports a mask, too. The combo would make strong men weep and dogs bay.

The armor isn’t all metal. There’s some leather, silk, and boar bristle. Still, it put me in a “Tora! Tora! Tora!” mood. Then the museum gives us a wall panel with a handy, succinct definition of metals and techniques. It’s good for most metalwork exhibitions and do-it-yourself projects, though, personally, I wouldn’t try them at home. I’d never heard of shakudo, which is copper mixed with a little gold, or shibuichi — 75 percent copper and 25 percent silver with a soupçon of gold. Both added color to armor, a grayish brown or black purple or — my favorite — a dark sheen likened to the moist feathers of a crow. Then there’s a wall panel with a map of Japan. I knew most of the cities from the history of World War II air raids.

For 700 years starting from the 1100s, samurai ruled Japan with the emperor along for the ride. They were like knights of yore, probably more savage but aesthetically refined. Swords, their fittings, mirrors, small bronze Buddhist figures, and kettles started samurai metal art. Blade-making was an art for hilts and sheaths as well as for lethality. Swords are aerodynamic so they can dispatch a foe with a single slash and a swoosh. A bronze mirror from the Muromachi period has a highly polished reflective front and a back decorated in bronze with a crane, a turtle, and a view of Mount Horai, the island of immortality. A bizarre Edo-period look-out mirror is a bronze globe, polished to the nines. Hung at a guard post, it showed a 360-degree view.

There’s a space for samurai armor sans a horse, with a part-by-part analysis. Gilt metal, engraved scrolling vines, whirlpools connoting might, and heraldic symbols, a dagger’s sheath decorated with sea motifs, and heraldic symbols are full of panache. Amid all this metal, a samurai commander in battle would signal troop movements with a paper fan.

Enough of the art of metalwork in the killing fields. I wasn’t surprised that Japan’s emperors commissioned silver presentation pieces, but a pair of silver, gold, copper, and shakudo vases from around 1900 are fabulous. Their flowering paulownia and chrysanthemum are polychromatic because of the mixing of metals — ethereal and exquisite. I look at it as relief sculpture — in metal — and a triumph in hammering, chasing, and alloys. They’re Meiji period (1868–1912), a time of Western-style modernization and the diminution of feudalism and the samurai. Metal artists began to think about art to export and to show in international exhibitions.

I reviewed an exhibition at the Asia Society in 2023 on Meiji art. The art jostles between tradition and modern and between old-time Asian abstraction — a delicacy and essentializing in forms — and out-and-out representation. The look is its own thing, not derivative or a sellout to Western aesthetics. A Meiji charger, about 16 inches in diameter, is so famous it’s called “The Dragon King of the Sea.” It and a sculpture are based on a tenth-century legend about a whopper centipede that invades the emperor’s palace, raised a ruckus, and, before long, gets killed by a samurai. For his valor, the samurai gets a bottomless bag of rice, a gem controlling the tides, a bronze bell, and an endless supply of shakudo. By this time, Japan’s metalworkers had segued from the trappings of war to luxury decorative goods, with new schools training the very best. The charger took two years to make.

Samurai goes from strength to strength. There’s a balance between war and peace, a nice variation in types of objects, and a good use of video. A sake fountain, for me, was a first. It’s from between 1825 and 1850, still Edo period, with a cast bronze mountain in the center, inlaid with gold and silver to simulate lichen, gold, silver, and bronze flora and fauna, and a mechanical device that probably dispensed water for washing the sake cup, but I want to think it dispensed the brewed rice wine itself. A video shows it in operation. It’s near a bronze eagle sculpture that does justice to the bird, with the same very high level of craftsmanship that we see in Remington’s bronze horses. A spiny lobster cast in iron looks real and does indeed move. A 4.5-foot bronze sculpture, The Dragon King Presenting a Jewel to Fujiwara no Hisato, from around 1880, has dozens of minute details and elements of sea life, all cast in bronze.

Then there’s a gallery for cloisonné. It begins with a panel describing technique and styles, for those of us who think of cloisonné as ceramics rather than metalwork and as bourgeois Victorian fancy ware rather than high art. One pole in Japanese art is the calligraphic and otherworldly, things like painted screens and scrolls not relevant to a metalwork show. These objects evoke dreams or fleeting moments. Another is the look of minute detail, motifs painstakingly rendered with exquisite palettes and heavenly sheen. That’s cloisonné, in Japan a 19th-century genre influenced by European enamel art but also by ceramics from China. Meiji cloisonné is the medium’s golden age.

Cloisonné begins with flat gold or silver wires bent to form compartments filled with hard, brittle, colored glass — enamel — and then kiln-fired and polished. It’s a mix of stained glass, where the pieces of colored glass are separated by lead contours, and Pointillism or mosaic, where each unit contributes to an overall, tonal design based on subtle gradations of color. The Japanese term for enamel is “shippo,” which means Seven Treasures, not objects but materials and colors — gold, silver, emerald, coral, agate, lapis lazuli, and pearl. Some of the cloisonné vases in the last gallery of Samurai are decorated with maple leaves or cherry blossoms, delicate, wispy things, while some designs are bold. Sometimes the wires are thick and incised with designs. Sometimes the wires are fully visible. Sometimes they’re removed before firing, creating subtly blurred edges between enamel sections. Sometimes the wires are removed in the middle of firing and polished to look faded and ethereal. The background colors are sublime, jet black or peach or cream or pearl-gray with a touch of gloss to look dreamy. I never thought a group of cloisonné vases would make for a showstopper, but these do the trick.

The DMA has a high-end, expansive collection of Meiji period art it got as a gift in the early 1990s from John and Frances Young, a Dallas couple. They were the big enchiladas in creating the museum’s Asian wing after John sold his intercom and radio business and spent years traveling and collecting with his wife, Frances. Among the many delights of museums outside, say, New York, is the idiosyncratic collections in museums from focused collectors we’ll find in Dallas, Fort Worth, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and many other places. The Youngs’ things can stand out and shine rather than fade among the multitudes.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum in Dallas is near the DMA and has a 300-work collection of samurai armor, helmets, masks, and weaponry. It’s the only samurai-specific museum in America and located in a nifty 1927 school built for Hispanic children. Gabriel Barbier-Mueller is a Dallas real estate mogul, born in Geneva, whose parents started their own Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva specializing in primitive art. Gabriel went to Southern Methodist University, married a Texan, and stayed.

The DMA’s new director, Brian Ferriso, has just started his reign after 20 years as director of the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon. We started as museum directors at about the same time and collaborated on a couple of projects. He reimagined the Portland museum, a modest civic museum in the hinterlands, playing to its untapped strengths, among them great Pacific Northwest art, an elegant building he renovated and expanded, and Portland’s cachet, which I’ve never understood. Mark Rothko came to Portland from Europe, a connection that led to a Rothko pavilion with art supplied by the artist’s estate. How do all those roses grow in so drizzly a place? It must have something going for it that I’m not seeing.

Brian raised the museum’s profile, did good exhibitions, and acquired well. He kept the place intact during the city’s ongoing bout with psychos and freaks. He’s a diplomatic, principled, focused, charming, and astute man. I admire him. The DMA has a challenging building expansion on its hands and thorny, sticky donor issues. If anyone can pull it through to the other side, he can.