268. KUMAKURA Junkichi ,1920-1985, Irabo tsubo (pot with Irabo glaze)

 268.  KUMAKURA Junkichi 熊倉順吉, 1920-1985, Irabo tsubo  伊羅保壺  (pot with Irabo glaze)

Kumakura was a major figure in the world of Japanese sculptural ceramics. He was born in 1920 in Kyoto and graduated in 1942 from the Kyoto Institute of Technology as a design major. From 1946 to 1947, Kumakura was an assistant to Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963) at the Shōsai Tōen kiln, where he was greatly influenced by Tomimoto’s techniques and his concept of the role of ceramist-artist. Throughout his career, Kumakura was attracted to and inspired by the improvisational character of jazz and its then-marginalized position in the world of music. Equally unusually for the period, much of his work is boldly and explicitly focused on sexuality and eroticism.  

He was awarded the first Japan Ceramic Society Prize in 1954 and soon thereafter he was invited to submit works to innumerable national and international exhibitions including the Brussels World Exposition in 1958, where he took the grand prize, and the International Ceramics Exhibition in Prague in 1962, where he took the silver prize. In 1989 a major retrospective exhibition, Kumakura Junkichi: Organs That Provoke, was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. His works are part of the permanent collections of the Japanese National Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. 

In the late 1940s, Kumakura became a core member of the avant-garde Sōdeisha 走泥社 (Crawling Through Mud Association; for more on this group of ceramicists, see the Wikipedia article, s.v. Sodeisha). Core to his practice were the aesthetic tenets of Sōdeisha that sought to elevate the status of the nonfunctional clay object. The beginnings of this philosophical exploration are manifested in his frequent use of two-dimensional geometric compositions on the flat surfaces of his functional wares. Early in his career, he used molds, a practice learned from Hamada Shōji and the folk arts movement. Later, his work became boldly sculptural. Kumakura was a pioneer of sculptural and avant-garde ceramics, which became a formal category in Japanese ceramics during the mid-twentieth century. His interest in sculptural, figurative, and organic forms bled into his functional wares, with their geometric and abstract shapes. 

White clay. Irabo glaze in muddy yellow and brown shades on all sides; bottom left unglazed. Weight: 840 g (1.9 lb). Height: 18.3 cm (7-1/4 in). Diameter of mouth: 2.5 cm (1 in). Dimensions of base: 20 x 11.7 cm (7-7/8 x 4-5/8 in). 

This is classed as an ichirin-sashi  一輪挿 , a vase for one flower. The piece rests on the flat margins of the base. The base is an oblong with pointed ends, slightly concave in the middle. Next to one of the pointed ends, Kumakura stamped a small square version of his seal, consisting of the first character of his given name, 順 jun. The edges of the base are slightly beveled upward. Above the base the walls form a shallow convex arc, moving upward and inward to the neck, which begins about 14.5 cm (5-3/4 in) above the base. The long neck is about 3.3 cm (1-1/4 in) wide at the bottom and slants inward slightly as it rises to the mouth, which is 2.5 cm (1 in) in diameter. There are pronounced seams where the front and back are joined, beginning at the pointed ends of the base and continuing to the mouth.  The surface of the piece is bumpy. The main body of the work is quite symmetrical; the neck less so. 

The sides of this were glazed using the Irabo glaze, resulting in colors in the brownish yellow to dark brown range. Irabo is one of the traditional ash glazes of Japan. According to one source, the glaze is made by combining equal parts of wood ash and an iron-rich clay such as ochre. Other sources say it made by combining equal parts of washed wood ash and feldspar. In an oxidizing firing using the second formula, this produces a yellow-brown glaze; in a reduction firing, the colors range from olive to a deep blue-green. The base, including the beveled edges, was left unglazed. The unglazed beveled edges present as a visible line of white at the bottom of the piece. 

For Kumakura, this is a relatively staid composition. For other examples of his work, see Figs. 49-53 in Samuel J. Lurie and Beatrice L. Chang, Contemporary Japanese Ceramics: Fired with Passion (New York, 2006). 

This came in a wooden box, inscribed by Kumakura in three lines: 伊羅保  / 壺  / 熊倉順  Irabo / tsubo / Kumakura Jun  (Irabo[-glazed] / pot / Kumakura Jun), followed by the artist’s seal stamped in red (a larger version of the same seal stamped on the base of the pot). A small paper label with the handwritten number 117 is affixed to one side of the box. Included in the box was a short biography; the last year noted is 1970, which dates this piece between 1970 and 1985. 

Purchased from the Kura Monzen Gallery, Kyoto, Japan, in January 2025 (invoice, shipping and customs documents)