A few years back, I wrote something in Greecejapan about my favorite Japanese pottery, Raku-yaki (楽焼) -they are the only ceramics I like enough to use one of them every day for my tea. This is it:
These days in the National Museum of Modern Art there is an exhibition with pieces from the collection of this family that has been evolving its art for 15 generations since the 16th century. The only picture I managed to take (shooting from the hip, of course!) is this from a room exhibiting pieces combining Raku aesthetics and modern forms -ironically it was the room with the pieces I liked the least.
In the exhibition's entrance, there was a classic piece made of aluminium for some NHK program -it was the only one you could touch and see from up close.
As always, I bought a tenugui -in the picture, it's in its envelope together with the flyer for the same exhibition when it was held for the first time at the Raku museum in Kyoto -yes, the English is, as usual, sheer poetry.
The tenugui unfolded and in all its glory. The tea bowls for which Raku is mostly famous are on the top and bottom, on the blue borders and in the center are lion-shaped incense burners -the dynasty has been making them too since the time of its founder.
A guide for the pieces on the tenugui, lions and all.
(For a bigger version of these pictures both in color and black and white, check my "Japan Arekore" set on Flickr)
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