Flower arranging basket, in an angular, winged form. Woven of split, yellow bamboo with black staining and split rattan. With the original display stand of assembled sections of sesame bamboo and wood. Signed on a signature plaque (mounted on the upper face of the round shelf for the flower arranging tsutsu), with an incised signature by the artist: Ippo Saku or Made by Ippo (Torii Ippo, born 1930). Showa era, circa 1957 – 1967.

With the tomobako or original box, inscribed on the exterior of the box lid: Hana-kago or Flower Basket, and signed by the artist: Ippo Saku or Made by Ippo, and sealed.

With the original tsutsu or water container, cut from a short cylinder of mosu timber bamboo.

For other examples of the artist’s work, c.f. Robert Coffland’s Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Arts, pages 122 – 127; see also Melissa Rhinne’s Masters of Bamboo: Artistic Lineages in the Lloyd Cotsen Japanese Basket Collection, number 63; and Masanori Moroyama’s Japanese Bamboo Baskets, page 104, number 67.

With this basket, Torii Ippo created a soaring, winged sculpture that prefigures much of his later work. Three bending triangles fold together from a circular foot-ring. Long slats of bamboo frame the sides of each section, filled with arrays of bamboo in parallel construction. Ippo cuts these parallel slats to have an almost square profile, then stains the sides and matte interiors black, with the satin, golden skin facing out and downwards. In effect, he shadows the upper sides of the wings. Simple wrapping (bo-maki) binds the framing sections together, while short, rounded lengths of insect stitch (mushi-kagari) link the wings to each other. The wing tips or points he finishes in insect wrapping (mushi-maki). On the interior the wings support a circular shelf of parallel stays (with the artist’s signature plaque, unusually turned upwards towards the sky). The shelf holds the tsutsu, when the sculpture is used for a flower arrangement.

We believe this basket to be one of Torii Ippo’s early exhibition pieces. The cypress boards of the tomobako show oxidation consistent with a late 1950s to early 1960s dating. When one looks at its intimate scale, one thinks of a modernist tea room. Then one remembers that in 1957 Ippo’s entry at the Japan Flower & Tea Ware Craft Arts Exhibition took the Tokyo Governor’s Award. After that success, it seems probable that the artist’s interest in tea ceremony likely inspired other work in this series.

The stand made for the basket was created to complement the basket’s architecture. Striped as if shadowed by the slatted wings, the stand alternates darker sections of wood with mottled, sesame bamboo. A group of prominent nodes marches in alignment on one side. Stands such as this sometimes were made for exhibition pieces, rarely were they paired by artists with their other work.

Finally, the work itself fits the mood and space age, modernism of other 1950s and early 1960s art. One has only to look through the pages of the Nittenshi to look at images of what artists exhibited in that decade. Whether in bronze or lacquer, sculptural vases with titles like “Flight” or “Soaring” punctuate the era, and a fresh fascination with abstraction inspires the art.