The head of the Zen academy was the priest Josetsu (active ca. 1400-1413), who took full control after Yoshimitsu's death in 1408. Josetsu's famous "Man Catching a Catfish with a Gourd," a parable of the elusiveness of true knowledge, is a perfect example of Japanese mastery of Sung styles, with its sharp foreground brushwork and misty distant mountains. The Zen academy dominated Japanese art until well after the Onin War, exploring and copying the great Sung works, both those in the lyric academic style and those in the spontaneous Ch'an style. Josetsu was succeeded by his pupil Shubun (flourishing 1423-d. ca. 1460), whose vast (attributed) output of hanging scrolls and sixfold screens was a precise re-creation of the Sung lyric style. He was not a mere imitator, but rather a legitimate member of a school long vanished, with a genuine understanding of the ideals that had motivated the Southern Sung artists. Shubun was a perfect master, a Zen Raphael, who so disciplined his style that it seemed effortless. His paintings are things of beauty in which the personality of the artist has disappeared, as was the intention of the Sung masters, resulting in works so perfectly of a type that they stand as a foundation on which others might legitimately begin to innovate.
However, under Shubun's successor Sotan (1414-1481), the academy continued to copy the techniques of dead Sung artists (as so often happens when art is institutionalized), producing works that showed no glimmer of originality. Zen art had reached maturity and was ready to become its own master; but it needed an artist who would place more trust in his own genius than in the dictates of the academy.
The individual who responded to this need is today looked upon as the finest Japanese artist of all time. Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506) was a pupil of Shubun and very nearly the contemporary of Sotan. Painting out of a profound sense of the spirit of Zen, Sesshu was able to dismantle the components of Sung landscapes and reassemble them into an individual statement of Zen philosophy. It is thought that he became a Zen priest early in life and spent his formative years in an obscure rural village on the Inland Sea. However, records show that at the age of thirty-seven he was a priest in a reasonably high position at Shokoku-ji, under the patronage of Yoshimasa, and a member of the academy presided over by Shubun. He apparently studied under Shubun until shortly before the Onin War, when he left Kyoto for a city on the southwestern coast and soon was on his way to China aboard a trading vessel.
Traveling as a Zen priest and a painter of some reputation, Sesshu was immediately welcomed by the Ch'an centers of painting on the mainland and by the Ming court in Peking. Although he was able to see and study many Sung paintings not available in the Kyoto Ashikaga collection, he was disappointed in the Ming artists he encountered and returned to Japan declaring he had found no worthy teacher in China except her streams and mountains. He also pronounced Josetsu and Shubun the equals of any Chinese painters he had met—probably the first time in history such a statement could have gone unchallenged. He never again returned to Kyoto, but established a studio in a western seaside village, where he received the mighty and passed his years in painting, Zen meditation, and pilgrimages to temples and monasteries. According to the traditional account, he declined an opportunity to become Sotan's successor as head of the Kyoto academy, recommending that the post be given to Kano Masanobu (1434-1530), who did in fact assume a position as official painter to the shogun in the 1480s. It later passed to Masanobu's son Kano Motonobu (1476-1559). This launched the decorative Kano school of painting which dominated Japanese art for centuries thereafter.
Sesshu was a renegade stylist who mastered the Sung formulas of Shubun early in his career and then developed striking new dimensions in ink painting. Despite his scornful assessments of Ming art, he learned a great deal in China which he later used, including an earthy realism that freed him from Shubun's sublime perfection, a sense of design that allowed him to produce large decorative sixfold screens which still retained the Zen spirit, and, perhaps most importantly, the Ch'an-inspired ''flung ink" technique which took him into the realm of semi-
abstraction. In his later years he became famous for two distinct styles which, though not without Chinese precedents, were strongly individualistic.
In the first of these, known as shin, the polished formulas of Shubun were supplanted by a controlled boldness, with rocks and mountains outlined in dark, angular brushstrokes seemingly hewn with a chisel. The landscapes were not so much sublimely unattainable as caught and worked to his will. The reverence for nature remained, but under his hand the depiction was almost cubist; the essence of a vista was extracted in an intricate, dense design of angular planes framed in powerful lines. Delicacy was replaced by dominance. Precursors of this style can be found in the works of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei, both of whom experimented in the hard, Northern-influenced techniques of brushstroke, but it was Sesshu who was the true master of the technique. Writing in 1912, the American critic Ernest Fenollosa declared him to be the greatest master of the straight line and angle in the history of the world's art.
Sesshu's second major style was so, an abstraction in wash combining the tonal mastery of the Southern Sung school with the "flung ink," or haboku, of the Ch'an school—a style in which line is almost entirely ignored, with the elements of the landscape being suggested by carefully varied tones of wash. A viewer familiar with the traditional elements of the Sung landscape can identify all the required components, although most are acknowledged only by blurred streaks and seeming dabs of ink which appear to have been applied with a sponge rather than a brush. In contrast to the cubist treatment of the shin style, the so defines no planes but allows elements of the landscape to blend into one another through carefully controlled variations in tonality. As effortless as the style appears to be, it is in fact a supreme example of mastery of the brush, an instrument intended for carving lines rather than subtle shading and blending of wash.
Because Sesshu chose to live in the secluded provinces, he did not perpetuate a school, but artists in Kyoto and elsewhere drew on his genius to invigorate Zen painting. One artist inspired by him was So'ami, a member of the Ami family which flourished during the academy's heyday. The earlier members of the family had produced acceptable works in the standard Sung style, but So'ami distinguished himself in a number of styles, including the so. The other artist directly influenced by Sesshu was the provincial Sesson (ca.1502-ca.1589), who took part of the earlier master's name as his own and became adept in both shin and so techniques. Although he, too, avoided strife-ridden Kyoto, he became famous throughout Japan, and his works suggest what the academy might have produced had Sesshu chosen to remain part of the Zen establishment. Yet even in Sesson's work one can detect a polished, effortless elegance that seems to transform Sesshu's hard-earned power into an easy grace, a certain sign that the creative phase of Zen art had ended.
The Ashikaga era of Japanese monochrome landscape is really the story of a few inspired individuals, artists whose works spanned a period of something more than one hundred and fifty years. As men of Zen, they found the landscape an ideal expression of reverence for the divine essence they perceived in nature. To contemplate nature was to contemplate the universal god, and to contemplate a painting of nature, or better still to paint nature itself, was to perform a sacrament. The landscape painting was their version of the Buddhist icon, and its monochrome abstraction was a profound expression of Zen aesthetics. Like the artists of the Renaissance, the Ashikaga artists worshiped through painting. The result is an art form showing no gods but resonant with spirituality.