Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection

The baskets in this scattershot but exhilarating show, which is organized around a promised gift from the collectors Diane and Arthur Abbey, are contextualized with objects and art works that encapsulate bamboo’s long-standing appeal to Japanese craftsmen. An elegant brown sliver of a tea scoop, made by the sixteenth-century tea-ceremony pioneer Sen no Rikyū, highlights the material’s natural beauty, while a plaited black bowler hat, made by Hakayakawa Shōkosai I for an eighteen-nineties Kabuki star, demonstrates its versatility. But the real revelation is the artistic achievement of the medium’s masters in the period since Japan began modernizing, in 1868. A flower basket in the shape of an ancient Chinese bronze, by Iizuka Housai II, has a dark, purplish color and a patterned, tightly woven finish that could pass for metal. A Second World War-era round fruit basket by Tanabe Chikuunsai II includes pieces of antique arrows, whose traces of red and black lacquer and gold leaf add flickers of color to the deep brown of its smoked bamboo; a gourd-shaped flower basket by the same artist surrounds a straight central shaft with thin strips in a loose hexagonal pattern as gauzy as a spiderweb. Nagakura Ken’ichi’s 2004 piece “Woman Flower Basket,” a tightly woven, irregularly lumpy, three-foot-tall vase with a narrow neck, has the otherworldly presence of a sculpture by Giacometti. (Metropolitan Museum of Art; Through Feb. 4.)