Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection offers an immersive look at the influential Rinpa tradition in Japanese art, featuring nearly 60 hanging scrolls, folding screens, fan paintings, and handscrolls drawn from the collection of Alice Yelen Gitter and the late Dr. Kurt A. Gitter, as well as selections from NOMA’s collection.
One of the most distinctive schools of Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868), Rinpa artists combined specialized ink painting techniques with a shimmering, polychrome palette in compositions to create scenes from nature. By using iconic signifiers of particular seasons as their subject matter, Rinpa artists participated in the creation of Japan’s “second nature”: a symbolic herbarium that evoked the flow of time and the range of human feeling. As a form of collective cultural memory, Japan’s second nature formed a set of motifs central to the Rinpa repertoire.
This softcover catalogue accompanies the exhibition on view at NOMA from October 2nd, 2026 to February 14th, 2027.
Dimensions: 8.5" x 11" x 0.25"
