Persimmons

This painting of two persimmons is based on Araki’s sketches of a world-renowned painting by the Chinese painter Muqi owned by a Japanese Zen monastery in Kyoto. This painting, called Six Persimmons, was extremely popular in the United States in the mid-1900s, when it was trumpeted by poets of the Beat Generation such as Gary Snyder (b. 1930). Seemingly less inspired by the profundity of the acclaimed Chinese ink painting than the subject’s ability to be used as a kind of personal logo, Araki—whose name “Minol” is written with the Chinese character meaning “fruit”—adopted Muqi’s fruit for one of his personal seals, which can be seen on a number of paintings, including the work Bird with Lotus Stem displayed in this gallery.