“Second Nature” exhibition opens today in New Orleans: nearly 60 Japanese Rinpa paintings, from Korin to Hoitsu

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) opened today, on October 2, the exhibition “Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection”, a comprehensive look at one of the most distinctive schools of Japanese painting of the Edo period (1615–1868), as NOMA announces.

Nearly 60 paintings — hanging scrolls, folding screens, fans, albums and handscrolls, as well as ceramics and decorative arts — tell the story of Rinpa, the school that combined ink techniques with a dazzling polychrome palette in compositions with motifs from nature. The name “Rinpa” literally means “School of Korin”, after the painter Ogata Korin (1658–1716).

At the centre of the exhibition stands Sakai Hoitsu (1757–1828), who at the end of the 18th century rediscovered and revived Korin’s achievements almost a century later, becoming, according to the curator, the “founder” of Rinpa. Among the most outstanding works is his triptych “Flowers and the Rising Sun”, considered one of the most important Rinpa paintings outside Japan. Also exhibited are works by Hon’ami Koetsu, Tawaraya Sotatsu, Nakamura Hochu, Suzuki Kiitsu, Sakai Oho — adopted by Hoitsu at the age of ten and one of his most prominent pupils — and Kamisaka Sekka, the figure who carried Rinpa into the modern era.

The exhibition, curated by Yukio Lippit, professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, comes mainly from the collection of Alice Yelen Gitter and the late Dr. Kurt A. Gitter (1937–2026), the New Orleans surgeon who assembled one of the world’s most important collections of Japanese art, with nearly 350 works donated to the museum over the years. It is accompanied by a new catalogue published specially for it and by a half-day symposium on Saturday, October 3.