Opinion: Kimonos, An Ancient Art Goes Modern

The Empress . . . was dazzlingly beautiful. Where else would one see a red . . . robe like this? Beneath it she wore a willow-green robe of Chinese damask, five layers of unlined robes of grape-colored silk, a robe of Chinese gauze with blue prints over a plain white background, and a ceremonial skirt of elephant-eye silk. I felt that nothing in the world could compare with the beauty of these colors.

So wrote Shonagon Sei, a lady-in-waiting to a 10th-century Japanese empress. One thousand years later, the description speaks to us as vividly as if it had been written yesterday - we're still intoxicated by beautiful clothes.

"The Kimono Inspiration: Art and Art-to-Wear in America" at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton is a heady treat both for those who get weak-kneed over hand-dyed silk and elaborate embroidery and also for those who know that art doesn't always come on a pedestal or in a square frame.

Antique Kimonos

The lighting has been lowered in the first gallery at the museum to protect the antique kimonos, which are displayed on a dais of raw wood and river stones.

One robe in particular, a silk furisode from the mid-19th century with long, swinging sleeves, is the kimono at its most breathtaking. Against a background of plum-colored silk an entire rhythmical embroidered landscape swirls and flows.

Here and there among the stylized trees, reeds, and blossoms - whose patterns are never exactly repeated - is a small house, a bridge, or a perching bird. One could weep for the loss of such skills.

The serious and well-disciplined will take their time in this room, which documents with photos, postcards, drawings, and paintings the influence of the kimono on Western fashion over the last century.

After Commodore Perry pressured Japan to open its borders in 1854, travelers began to return with kimonos and other artesania and a craze for everything and anything Japanese swept the West: Japonisme became the big word in art, architects were influenced by Japanese simplicity, "Madame Butterfly" died on a thousand stages, and the Three Little Maids from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado" appeared in advertisements for soap.

But above all, the symbol of the exotic East was the kimono, representing to Victorian minds - male minds, of course - three titillating concepts: the eroticism of the unknown, the rumored sexual skills of the geisha, and the totally submissive behavior of Japanese women.

Monet, Renoir, Tissot, van Gogh, Merritt Chase, and Whistler all painted Western women wearing ki monos, and it wasn't for the beautiful embroidery.

Modern Art-To-Wear

There is also a lovely series of Japanese wood block prints here which includes the stunning "Young Woman Behind Sliding Panels" by Yoshitoshi (1839-92).

But by this point, visitors of a less-disciplined turn of mind may find themselves having trouble with gallery one, which is beginning to look like the spinach which must be eaten before the chocolate cake.

For there in the distance, beckoning with a gluttony of color, the main gallery has the raison d'etre of the exhibit - a breathtaking collection of 35 modern art-to-wear kimonos.

The two-dimensional, rectilinear form of the kimono offers an ideal shape for artists to work with and its ceremonial connotation means that it can accommodate any leap of imagination. Those you can see at the Parrish will give you an idea of what can be achieved.

Elegy To Loss

Some of the kimonos are exquisitely delicate. There is Carter Smith's "Fire and Ice," a shimmering shibori resist-dyed robe whose patterns are like petrol on water, and Ris‰ Nagin's "Fog Area," a diaphanous geometrical composition of silk, cotton, and polyester in whites and grays.

In Danielle Ray's "Snow Kimo no," made of woven wool, snow-laden branches stretch across the sleeves.

Ben Compton's stunning "Ma dame Butterfly" robe is a haunting composition of stained silk and faded lace, strangely appliqued with jagged threads of black yarn, glossy mussel shells, and charred fabric. It is a mute and moving elegy to loss.

"Sweltering Sky"

And then there are the bright and the bold, like Yvonne Porcella's "Pasha on the 10:04," a larger-than-lifesize patchwork-quilt kimono in black and white and red where the main interest, a partly hand-painted collage of naked figures, is on the inside of the kimono.

Or Judith Content's "Sweltering Sky," a beautiful conflagration of dyed, quilted, and appliqued silk burning against a night sky of blue and purple.

There are boldly simple kimonos, like Deborah Valoma's black and white "Following Ariadne's Thread," and light-hearted kimonos, like Linda Mendelson's multicolored woven wool robe whose sleeves read, "Just around the corner there's a rainbow in the sky" and "So let's have another cup of coffee, let's have another piece of pie."

And then there are the offbeat and non-functional. Christine Martens's "Vestment II" is heartstopping in its heavy ritual glory of woven and pieced fabric, glittering with gold and silver thread. It is "kimono" in the abstract - too heavy to wear, just as Jan Janeiro's "Skeletal Kimono," a gossamer web of knotted raffia, is too fragile to wear.

It doesn't matter if it's 20-ton steel sculpture or ceramic teacups, a good exhibit should evoke pleasure, awe, and that odd sensation of mental creaking as the brain struggles with something complex and excitingly different. "The Kimono Inspiration" does that.

The show can be seen through May 31.