Have any artists ever, anywhere, caught the hello-ness of spring and the farewell-ness of autumn more sweetly and sharply than the Rimpa painters of Japan? Two shimmering fall exhibitions, one at Japan Society and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, argue persuasively that no, no artists ever have.


Although sometimes referred to as a movement, Rimpa was really a style or sensibility passed on, with breaks in the flow, throughout the Edo period (1615-1868) and into the 20th century. Although painting was its most conspicuous medium, Rimpa was about design, total effect, taste that embraced calligraphy, textiles, ceramics and lacquer. You painted Rimpa, but you also wrote it, wore it, and ate your sushi and drank your tea from it.


That said, the style is hard to define. Seasonal change in nature is its recurrent subject. But the Rimpa version of nature is often highly stylized, posed, poeticized, simultaneously abstracted into ornamental patterns and rendered with fantastically detailed accuracy.


The results are nothing if not eye friendly. Colors tend to be bold, with lots of green, red and blue on gold. Images are often crisp and distinct, readable from afar, like advertisements. Even Rimpa’s subtleties — and they are many — feel emphatic, demonstrative, like mini tours de force: the artist is now showing us how skilled he is, how refined, how witty.


The Met and Japan Society exhibitions together add up to one of the largest Rimpa displays seen outside of Japan in years. The Met’s gives us a broad view of the style; the Japan Society’s, a more concentrated one.  


 “Designing Nature: The Rimpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art,” drawn largely from the Met’s permanent collection by John T. Carpenter, a curator in the Asian art department, describes Rimpa’s historical trajectory in thrilling strokes, as a style passed on from hand to hand, mind to mind.


The idea of transmission is embedded in the very word Rimpa (alternately spelled Rinpa), which translates as “school of Korin.” The reference is to Ogata Korin, an artist central to its history. Korin, born in Kyoto in 1658, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, studied painting under teachers associated with the conservative, Chinese-influenced Kano family style favored by the Tokugawa warrior elite.


But Korin, independent in spirit and antiquarian in his interests, began looking elsewhere for his models, specifically to the work of Japanese artists of an earlier generation, like Tawaraya Sotatsu (who died around 1640) and the calligrapher Hon’ami Koetsu (1558-1637). In them he found an alternative to Kano academicism — a simpler, more direct approach to nature and the expression of emotions.


Koetsu’s art, almost exclusively calligraphic, is alluring in an intimate way. A 10th-century poem inscribed by him on a sheet of plain white paper is tiny in size but designed for detonation. The word “love” stands big and bold, near the center of the page, with the poem’s other words scattered here and there, so you have to piece together the meaning. When you do, you find that what promised to be a valentine is exactly the opposite:


If I die of love,


No other name than yours


Will be raised in blame,


But no doubt you’ll just say, 


That’s life; nothing lasts forever.


Sotatsu, who has a reputation as an influential landscape painter, is an elusive figure. No large-scale painting indisputably by him survives, though the Met has several folding screens attributed to his studio, all superb in different ways.


One eight-panel screen looks back to court art from a previous age, with characters from the 11th-century “Tale of Genji” acting out dramas of desire and intrigue amid stage-prop trees and houses on a field of gold. An extraordinary six-panel screen also seems to be delivering a story of some kind, but about what? All it shows are two open boats floating, ominously empty and unmoored, on a roiling silver sea.