Vase in a bottle form with a tall, stepped neck, ornamented on the front and back with a stylized flower bud motif. Of celadon porcelain, the design carved in relief. With the original carved rosewood, tray-form stand. By Yagi Isso (1894 – 1973). Showa 4 or 1929.

With the tomobako or original box, inscribed on the exterior of the lid: Hoga no I Kabin or Conceptual Flower Bud Vase, and signed: Heian Isso Saku or Made by Isso (of) Kyoto; and on the reverse of the lid dated: Showa Yon-nen Sei or Made in Showa (era) 4th Year (1929), and signed: Isso Saku or Made by Isso.

This vase was made for exhibition at the 10th Teiten in 1929, and it is illustrated in the Nittenshi, volume 9, page 280, number 161.

As Louise Cort records in her account of the Kyoto ceramic world, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, Yagi Isso moved from Osaka to Kyoto to study ceramics at the Ceramics Research Institute. He joined with five classmates in 1919 to found a group they called Akatsuchi or Red Clay. This was in defiant opposition to the refinement of the “white clay” ceramics displayed in government-sponsored exhibitions such as the Noten. The group “startled the staid Kyoto art world by giving poetic rather than descriptive titles to their works and charging admission to their exhibitions.” The Akatsuchi potters disbanded in 1923 and by the end of the decade were themselves participating in the crafts section of the government-sponsored Teiten (which was added to the fine art categories only in 1927). The Teiten (and its successors the Shin-Bunten and the Nitten) in some regards functioned like an official “salon,” (in Louise Cort’s words) and became the most highly sought after venue for public recognition in the arts.

This celadon vase represents the flawless perfection of potting and glazing achieved by the best ceramic artists working in Kyoto in the early decades of the 20th century. It also embodies Yagi Isso’s restrained, modernist aesthetic, one in which pure elegance of form and color combine with abstraction. The contrast with the richly ornamental ceramics of the late Meiji – Taisho era could not be more marked.