Kogakusai Saku or Made by Kogakusai (Sasaki Kogakusai, active in Tokyo, Taisho – Showa Eras). Early Showa Era, circa 1930 – 1940.

Sasaki Kogakusai was undoubtedly strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the young Mingei or Folk Art Movement in the 1920s and 1930s. As well he clearly knew the work of Iizuka Rokansai. The inspiration for this basket seems to come from a workaday farm basket, perhaps even a winnowing basket, though Kogakusai creates something far more abstract here. As Rokansai often did, he drops the classical weaving vocabulary to concentrate on color, shape and texture. He avoids formal knotting or fine plaiting, instead turning to a coarse and abstracted version of lozenge plaiting to form the warping face of the basket. He chose smoked bamboo with extraordinary red color, only partially cleaning the heavy black encrustation away. The un-cleaned dark surfaces whether skinned or reversed to the interior matte half of the bamboo play off the gleaming deep reds themselves touched with black. The effect echoes the interior of a richly toned (and smoked) Minka farmhouse. Twisting sections of root-wood frame the sides of the basket, two of them interwoven to ripple across the top like a handle, while another twists beneath to form the foot. Between the irregular rim and the face, Kogakusai ceases to plait, only extending an open-work array of slats to loop over the root-wood edges. The effect brings to mind the tea aesthetics of Wabi and Sabi, of the beauty that time can lend to commonplace things, of evanescence and change, mortality.

For other pieces by Sasaki Kogakusai in the Cotsen Collection, c.f. Japanese Bamboo Baskets: Masterworks of Form and Texture, number 183 and 185.