Monika Kopplin
Homage to Japanese Lacquer
Although lacquer plays a comparatively marginal role as a medium of painting in modern art, prominent names and artworks nonetheless come to mind ad hoc. Sigmar Polke, who has even been described as a lacquer fetishist, is one such striking exception; Gerhard Richter adopted lacquer in a purist sense for individual groups of artworks, particularly in his colour chart panels of the 1960s and 1970s. Both artists worked almost exclusively with industrially manufactured lacquer based on synthetic resins. The aim of developing artistic applications for modern colourants and, above all, lacquers was served by the “Lacktechnikum” laboratory that was set up in Wuppertal in 1940 on the initiative of the lacquer manufacturer and art collector Kurt Herberts and in which Oskar Schlemmer, Franz Krause and Kurt Baumeister created a multipart series of experimental painted panels entitled Modulation und Patina in the years up to 1944. The focus was accordingly always on synthetic lacquer which, when subsequently utilised, seemed optimally well suited for achieving each artist’s intentions.
Harmen Brethouwer’s fascination with lacquer dates back to the year 2000 and led him to an intensifying exploration of a material that progressively revealed itself to him in its diverse characteristics, potential processing techniques and, above all, in the depth of the meanings attributed to it. This gradual approach is primarily due to the fact that Brethouwer does not use synthetic lacquers, but only natural lacquer, a material which is native to East Asia, largely unknown to Western artists and did not become accessible in a liquid and workable state until the twentieth century. When he became aware of the work of the furniture designers Eileen Gray (1878-1976) and Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941) in the late 1990s, he especially admired how they combined exquisite and sometimes exotic materials with clear, modernist design. Asian lacquer played a central role in Eileen Gray’s work in particular thanks to her training with the Paris-based Japanese lacquer master Seizō Sugawara (1884-1937), from whom she learned the unique qualities of the material and its specific processing techniques at first hand.
Lacquer – its origin and essence
Lacquer (Chinese qī, Japanese urushi) is the sap of the lacquer tree Rhus vernicifera, which is native to East Asia. The characteristics of its sap were first discovered in the Neolithic period and have been continually utilised by humans for about eight millennia. Then as now, the bark of the tree is cut in horizontally staggered notches. The milky-white secretion that emerges is scraped out and collected in small barrels. The Japanese call this process urushi kaki, “collecting the lacquer”. The raw lacquer obtained in this way requires filtration as well as dehydration and homogenisation through continuous stirring under the influence of heat. Only after this refinement process can the resulting lacquer serve as an optimal coating, which hardens and not only becomes resistant to water, acids and alkalis, but also protects and preserves its substrate, which it endows with inimitable gloss and smoothness. The durability of the preservation and the long-lasting, nearly imperishable quality of East Asian lacquer is impressively demonstrated by lacquer-coated weapons and vessels dating from the fourth to sixth millennium BCE that were brought to light by archaeological excavations. Lacquer’s preservative properties are accompanied by an antibacterial effect inherent to many tree resins, which is particularly effective as a preventative measure in connection with food and foodstuffs, thus making lacquer an especially valued material for this purpose. If no pigmentation is added, East Asian lacquer has a naturally brown colour, which appears brownish-black after multiple layers have been applied. The addition of natural pigments – iron ochre or cinnabar for red lacquer, pine or lampblack for black lacquer – endowed lacquer with the red and black colours that remain predominant today. Only very few other natural pigments (e.g., malachite for green lacquer and orpiment for yellow lacquer) made additional colours possible; most other pigments either turned out to be noncolourfast or were even decomposed by the lacquer. It was not until the development of synthetic pigments and their introduction in Japan in the late nineteenth century that the colour spectrum of East Asian lacquer could be significantly broadened in several innovative steps. As limited as the colour range was for centuries, a seemingly unlimited number of techniques developed and were utilised to achieve the most diverse effects with East Asian lacquer. This extraordinary diversity of potential designs constitutes the material’s true potential.
Red and black – an obeisance to the eternally valid
Like Eileen Gray, but with his focus on an intellectual approach, Harmen Brethouwer has become intimately acquainted with his chosen material. He recognised lacquer’s extraordinarily high quality, incomparable to that of any other material – “for me it represents an ideal of quality, in many respects” – and decided to dedicate a special series to it. At that time, the Japanese artist Mariko Nishide was the only lacquer artist living in the Netherlands. He visited her in her studio in Amstelveen and was able to persuade her to realise the artwork Le Rouge et le Noir with Japanese lacquer according to his specifications. Consisting of two square panels of the same size, it pays equal homage to East and West. While its title refers to Stendhal’s homonymous roman-à-clef, it simultaneously pays tribute to red and black as the essential, indeed identity-giving colours of East Asian lacquer art par excellence. However, this preeminent status, which elevates red and black to the rank of classics, is not so much due to a free, artistic impulse to use these two colours, but rather to the absence of alternatives as dictated by the circumstances. In a spectrum reduced to just five colours (black, red, yellow, green and reddish brown), red and black occupied the strongest positions and lent themselves to the most effective contrasts. Black lacquer was perceived as the most intense embodiment of the colour, for which reason “lacquer black” (qī hei) became the Chinese term for the deepest black hue of all; red lacquer acquired an almost spiritual dimension thanks to the admixture of cinnabar, which Taoists held in high esteem as the reputed elixir of longevity. Lacquer per se was likewise said to have a life-prolonging effect, and this desirable property was thought to be further enhanced when cinnabar was added. The panel duo Le Rouge et le Noir, which Brethouwer created in 2001, initially remained a one-of-a-kind artwork, but its format, material and technique, and even more so its conceptual approach, were to form the starting point for a subsequent series of works.
China’s aesthetic maxim in Japanese lacquer
Harmen Brethouwer explains that another initial spark was triggered in him by The Monochrome Principle: Lacquerware and Ceramics of the Song and Qing Dynasties, which was published by the Museum für Lackkunst in Münster in 2008. Whether glazed or entirely covered with layers of monochrome lacquer, the Chinese vessels presented on its pages document an ancient turning towards monochromaticity, which began as early as the ninth century, was wholly independent of trends in Western art and regarded the combination of ideal form and the uncompromising use of single colours as a manifestation of perfection. The porcelains, especially those dating from the acme of this development in the eighteenth century, impressed Brethouwer with their wide spectrum of colours, which were created for no other sake but their own – whether articulated in light green, rich “imperial” or pale lemon-butterfly yellow, whether in pink, lavender blue or aubergine purple. Above all, and notwithstanding the perfection of their craftsmanship, the inherent simplicity of the lacquered vessels and their focus on the material and its essence reminded Brethouwer of minimalist painting, which is similarly based on radical simplification and reduction. He once again recognised in East Asian lacquer the medium with which he could realise his concept of a freely developing sequence of panels in monochrome design.
The nature and chemical composition of East Asian lacquers are identical, regardless of whether the raw material is harvested in China or Japan. However, different traditions have developed in the methods of refining the raw lacquer and the techniques of its artistic processing, which make it seem justified to speak separately of Chinese and Japanese lacquer. Brethouwer’s intention – i.e., to articulate the monochrome in lacquer – can be traced to a Chinese impetus, but local conditions were conducive towards realising his idea with Japanese lacquer. The manifestation of his envisioned ideas required the skills of a specialist who had mastered the material and the specific techniques of lacquerwork – a task for which very few experts were available, whether in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. Nearly without exception, the few active lacquer artists orientated themselves almost exclusively on Japanese lacquer. Brethouwer found the ideal partner in Sergej Kirilov, who had learned to work with Japanese lacquer under the tutelage of Mariko Nishide. Kirilov, who opened his lacquer studio in Arnhem in 2009, not only has many years of experience working with well-established Japanese lacquer techniques, but has also dedicated himself to innovatively develop new technical variants. His personal quest for previously untested or unachieved effects, along with his striving to realise an even greater number of expressive possibilities with lacquer, predestined him to collaborate on this project. Both artists – the conceptualising visionary on the one hand and the executing craftsman on the other hand – inspired each other’s creativity, often during the actual process of creating a work, thus making this complex of works possible in its multifaceted entirety. The physical realisation of the envisioned ideas on the panels demanded precise craftsmanship, which also involved highly time-consuming and meticulous work processes, and accordingly rendered support by Kirilov’s assistant Marina Korotkaja indispensable.
Variations of black
Black lacquer must necessarily play a central role in any series of artworks dedicated to monochrome lacquer. The spectrum of explored variations includes the panel Antecedent Black, whose realisation was spontaneously interrupted in the midst of the polishing process in order to capture the black lacquer in statu nascendi. The artist opted to leave the lacquer’s surface matt so that it would seem “like a first experience of black paint for mankind”. Black – undulating similarly focuses on a monochrome, midnight-black hue, which engages in an animated interplay of light and shadow through the lacquer’s application onto a wavy, relief-like substrate. This panel was created with rōiro urushi, an especially fine and deep black lacquer that acquires its immaculate lustre after painstaking final polishing; it particularly illustrates why “lacquer black” is considered to be the ultimate black. Panels such as Black versus Black contrast with the absoluteness and nobility of mirror-finished black. Here too only black lacquer was used, but the fine texturing of the surface produces a vividly iridescent effect in the reflected light. This effect enables the lineament’s multiple refractions to conjure illusions of varyingly saturated black tones, some of which appear to brighten into larger grey-black fields. The intentionally restless appearance is the result of a lacquer technique developed by Kirilov himself. Salangan, on the other hand, is a meditative, serene and slightly oscillating square whose monochrome black lacquer seems to absorb everything and, not coincidentally, to elicit thoughts of black holes in the vastness of the universe. In the sequence of his black panels, Brethouwer explores all of the potentials and effects, and thus the quintessence, of monochrome art, in which nothing but the material counts and the “omnipotence of colour” leads to total abstraction. Pierre Soulages (1919-2022) pursued similar intentions in his Outrenoirs, but mainly realised these paintings with ordinary paint. Working with East Asian lacquer, on the other hand, not only grants access to an expanded potential of expressive possibilities inherent in the material per se, but also presupposes the artist’s readiness to submit to lacquer’s natural properties and to comprehend the time-consuming process of creation, which excludes spontaneous realisation, as an integral component of the artwork.
Transformation in black
Just how variable East Asian lacquer is in the variety of possible techniques becomes particularly clear in Brethouwer’s five-part series Sequence . All of these small-format squares were coated with black lacquer, into which tiny flakes of silver were sprinkled in increasing density from panel to panel. A subtle surface structure, barely perceptible on the first two panels, becomes apparent on the third, where it gently interrupts the continuity of the lacquer black; the fourth panel appears as a cloudy mottle with shimmery golden areas; and the fifth panel shows full-surface sprinkling accompanied by a warm, reddish-brown colour. This ruddy hue is due to the final application of a reddish-yellow transparent lacquer, which combines with the scattered silver particles to produce a glistening effect. The desired metamorphosis from black to reddish iridescent lacquer that is made visible here can be achieved only by this specific technique. The underlying process is called nashiji, a particularly important variant of the sprinkling technique perfected by the Japanese, which itself offers a range of gradations. It is based on the sprinkling of more or less fine-grained or flaky particles of gold, silver or their alloy onto an a not yet hardened lacquer coating, into which they sink and ultimately manifest their gorgeous effect as a sprinkled background or sprinkled image. Whether and to what extent the colour of the lacquer background comes into play depends on the fineness of the metal particles and the density of their sprinkling. Brethouwer hints at this combination of lacquer and precious metal only in Sequence – not as a quotation, but as the transformation of a process that enables him to achieve the finest chromatic gradation.
From red to black and from black to red
The panel Schism (p. 35) occupies a central position in the series of works, where its prominent importance is made immediately apparent by the dark metal frame reserved solely for it. In the confines of a large square format, black and red – lacquer’s two absolute colours – are brought together in a single artwork, albeit not in their final form. Rather, this panel is a further development of Antecedent Black, created eight years earlier. In Schism, an application of lacquer creates a fluent transition from dark red to soft black and, as it were, describes the emergence of both colours. Neither of the two hues reaches the full extent of its potential power; both seem to have been arrested in the process of emerging from a common primordial source and immortalised in the fluent stage of their gradual separation into red and black. Every evolutionary process of differentiation by splitting is vividly demonstrated in this image of the genesis of colours, which could perhaps be interpreted as a parable of evolution per se. The result of this process of separation towards deep black and bright red is repeatedly visualised in individual panels as well as in entire, self-contained series of smaller coloured squares – just as, for example, the group The Four Reds focuses exclusively on the colour red in several chromatic nuances.
Although or rather because red lacquer is perceived as an equally strong antipole to its black counterpart, the two are often used together in a single work of East Asian lacquer art, where they appear either in pointedly presented decorative contrasts or in concealed, only partially apparent coexistence. Their covert combination characterises a specific aesthetic, which, originally conceived in China, found a formulation of its own in Japanese lacquer art in so-called Negoro lacquer. The panel Red on Black is a direct continuation of this genre: Bright red lacquer strata are applied atop layers of black lacquer, whose presence is partly visible only along the edges of the panel, where abrasion has rubbed off the red lacquer and allowed the black lacquer to emerge. Irregular black areas such as these originally appeared after red lacquered vessels had undergone prolonged use for many years. They were particularly likely to reveal themselves on exposed and wear-prone places such as the edges of the vessels or the mirrors of lacquered trays. These age-related traces of use were not thought to diminish the value of the object; on the contrary, they were venerated as patterns which, although foreseen, unplanned in their specific manifestation and left to chance, aptly visualised the factor of time and its passage. Time per se, rendered visible by the abrasion of lacquer, thus became a component of the artwork. Centuries-old Negoro lacquers, with large black areas attesting to their antiquity, are held in reverential esteem In Japan. Furthermore, the contrast of black abraded areas on an otherwise red object is perceived as enhancing the piece’s aesthetic expression, because the red is fulfilled only in the black and the black only in the red. So too on Brethouwer’s panel, the vividness of the red is reaffirmed by the black lacquer that appears sporadically along the edges, where it confirms the red lacquer’s luminosity and chromatic identity. Although the abrasion here is not caused by age, but – as on many recent Japanese Negoro lacquers – has been deliberately produced by sanding, it nonetheless takes account of the logic of generations of use and wear by positioning the largest black areas along the edges, where thumbs and palms would have touched the panel countless times over the years. By minimal means, red and black are mutually confirmed, each in its own identity, as if each were saying, “C’est moi”.
The panel Negoro in Winter, whose title explicitly refers to the Japanese lacquer technique and to the aesthetics on which it is based, is an unconventional variation on this theme. Here again, the undercoat is black; but instead of red lacquer, a cream-coloured lacquer has been applied that is not found in traditional Japanese lacquer art and was first made possible by the use of synthetic pigments. Its off-white colour has settled like snow atop the black background, which emerges – only dimly in some places, more clearly articulated in others – to form a circle. The serenity of the colour together with the circle, which is only hinted at but nevertheless effective in its presence, combine to create an impulse of contemplative immersion and remind us that the tradition of Negoro lacquers can be traced back to the Buddhist monks of the Negoro temple.
The common practice of applying East Asian lacquer in multiple layers, sometimes in alternating colours or in alternation with other materials, is also reflected in the two panels entitled Red on Gold, one of which shows a lighter reddish nuance, the other a darker shade of red. The background’s contrasting materiality and colour are achieved not by partially exposing the underlayer, but by applying a glaze of red lacquer. Gold foil applied across the entire surface lends a sublimely metallic glow to the overlaid brownish-red transparent lacquer.
Beyond black and red
The delight of creative experimentation, which is an essential characteristic of monochrome painting, also led to a series of panels such as Teadust and Robin’s Egg, whose colours – encased in the resin of the lacquer tree – develop an unusually bright effect. These vivid greens and blues are not found in the traditional palette of Japanese lacquer and first became possible thanks to synthetic pigments, which lastingly expanded the colour spectrum of Japanese lacquer art beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. But it is not only the colours per se that are borrowed from Chinese ceramics, whose rich palette of monochrome glazes was made possible by trailblazing technological advances; the titles of the two panels likewise directly adopt the often lyrically tinged vocabulary which East Asian ceramists and aficionados coined to describe these sublime creations. The tints of these glazes appeared so incomparable and enchanting that they influenced the language of the poets, and their poetically descriptive names gave rise to a distinctive linguistic aesthetic. No less impressed by China’s monochrome ceramics than by its monochrome lacquers, Brethouwer also draws inspiration from this source, which prompted him to venture beyond the narrow confines of traditional lacquer colours and create a whole series of panels in radiantly vivid hues and often with a daring colourfulness that celebrates colour for its own sake. This unprecedented palette was made possible by precisely defined instructions to the Japanese suppliers, who duly manufactured the lacquers in the specified colours. The series culminates in two panels: Antibacterial Monochrome, which has a delicate yet unrelenting purple and a title alluding to the admired antiseptic properties of Asian lacquer; and Shocking Pink, whose reddish-purple pink recreates a colour popularised under the same name by the Italian couturière Elsa Schiaparelli. By invoking this vivid shade of pink, which became Schiaparelli’s trademark as early as the 1930s, Brethouwer forges a cross-cultural and cross-epochal link between a cult symbol of Western fashion and the entirely new colours that transcended all previous limits and first appeared in monochrome Chinese ceramics in the eighteenth century.
Polychromy as an option
Although the potential of the monochrome appears far from exhausted by a series of multipart sequences of artworks and by a larger number of individual panels, the juxtaposition of several colours grants access to a further, almost endless trove of possibilities. This variation, which is likewise beholden to abstraction, appears as an experiment in a series that currently comprises only a few panels: In addition to white, blue and green, Barn Find also incorporates the classic lacquer colours of red and black to generate a dynamically explosive mixture reminiscent of 1950s tachism. Here, however, random chance plays a major role because, in the creative process, surplus lacquer was wiped off the brush and onto the panel. As an objet trouvé that opens the viewer’s eyes to an expanded concept of artmaking beyond the norms of traditional lacquerwork, Brethouwer deemed it worthy of inclusion in the series. By comparison, the panel Borrowed Scenery appears delicate and enraptured, with combinations of bright red, green and purple tones creating a concert of colours. Here, the lacquer appears restrained in its specific material language and looks as if it has been applied in the manner of oil paint, so that the light-flooded colourfulness of the panel seems like a detail from an impressionist painting. This polychromy too results from the juxtaposition and overlapping of colour tones created by chance, which here, however, receive their final weighting only in the colour composition after they have hardened and undergone irregularly intensive sanding.
The white challenge
Last but by no means least, white is another colour that is not found in the traditional spectrum of the lacquer art. The effect of white lacquer was nevertheless sought, so a method was invented, albeit only at a late stage in the historical development, which has its own inherent aesthetic appeal. In the eggshell lacquer technique, pressing pieces of eggshell into a black, still-damp lacquer substrate shatters the shell into small, irregular fragments. The particles adhere firmly in it the East Asian lacquer, which has a pronounced adhesive effect. After another application of lacquer, which covers the entire surface, has hardened, this layer is sanded off. The resulting surface is not only smooth and even, but also reveals the eggshells, whose hold in the lacquer has been strengthened in this way. The dark contrasting colour of the lacquer background is visible in the countless interstices between adjacent fragments of shell.
Brethouwer first encountered this extremely elaborate process on lacquered furniture and objects in the art deco style, particularly in the work of Jean Dunand (1877-1942), in whose oeuvre this technique, executed by specialists from Vietnam, featured prominently. Brethouwer’s spontaneous fascination with eggshell lacquer inspired him to create an entire group of artworks, the first panels of which were completed as early as 2010 and – with Broken White 1 – inaugurated his collaboration with Sergej Kirilov. Marina Korotkaja was even more deeply involved in the creation of this series than in the realisation of the other panels. Her patience and precision were indispensable to the realisation of most of these eggshell mosaics. Unlike the Japanese eggshell lacquer, whose pure white colour is achieved through the use of the shells of hens’ eggs, the majority of panels in this series utilise the shells of ostrich eggs, which are considerably larger than hen’s eggs and have a far greater surface area that makes them better suited for application to more expansive substrates. The exterior of an ostrich shell has a brownish-creamy colour, but the inner surface has a whitish hue comparable to the colour of a hen’s egg. Subsequent sanding can expose this off-white interior layer.
Within this group of works, ostrich eggshell white is articulated in its cool and somewhat aloof nuance on a series of panels titled Broken White. As in Broken White 1, 2 and 3, this pale variation was achieved by sanding off the cream-coloured surface of the shells, but nevertheless shows subtly shaded nuances that differ from panel to panel. The finely differentiated perception of white is due here to a contrastingly coloured lacquer background, whose black, light brown and red appears in narrow fissures along the edges of individual fragments, where it contributes to the overall chromatic impression. The pattern of the bits of shell enclosed in the lacquer is characterised by the random irregularity of craquelure. In contrast, the eggshell mosaic on Broken White – piece by piece presents itself in orderly infinity and bears witness to the individual arrangement and meticulous positioning of each fragment in the lacquer background. The ostrich shells on another variant in this series were left completely untreated, thus highlighting their naturally cream-coloured hue; only in a particular incidence of light does a multicoloured shimmer reminiscent of mother-of-pearl reveal itself like a disclosed secret. The title of the panel Broken White – exposed edges puns on “off-white” and “shattered fragment” because “broken white” is the literal English translation of gebroken wit, which means “off-white” in Dutch. This artwork’s title thus subtly takes into account both the technique and the colour: the off-white tone of the broken eggshells is addressed in the overall chromatic effect, as well as in the internal structure and the jagged fractures that are purposely exposed along the edges. It is not only the artisanal method and the effect it produces that are emphatically visible here; this panel also exemplifies the precise, thoughtfully chosen and often uniquely poetic titles of the individual panels.
Variations of blue-green
Another series belonging to this group of artworks varies the eggshell lacquer not in the process itself, but through the use of emu eggshells. An emu’s egg has an intense and mottled blue-green exterior, a middle layer with a bluish tint and a whitish inner surface. The panel Emu– brut accordingly constitutes a reversal of white eggshell lacquer because here the dark blue-green emu shell is pressed into a paler contrasting background and the craquelure stands out in white interstitial lines. Emu – reverse crush 1 and Emu – reverse crush 2, for which the shell’s pale inner surface was pressed into black lacquer, are counterparts in the opposite sense – with the difference that in variant 2, the bluish middle layer has been partially exposed by strong sanding, imbuing the panel with a delicate and enchantingly bluish iridescence. The panel Emu Green (p. 78) similarly takes advantage of this principle of a colour change brought about and controlled by the sanding process. The shell’s blue-green exterior is pressed into black lacquer and, after the latter has hardened, the panel is partially sanded to reveal the lighter intermediate tone and create an animated, varyingly coloured surface. The use of emu eggshells and this material’s inherent potential to create differentiated gradations of blue are a technical innovation that Sergej Kirilov developed in the course of many years of working alongside Brethouwer.
To a greater degree than any other group of Brethouwer’s artworks, this multipart sequence of eggshell lacquered panels reveals the complex and experimental character of the entire series. Panel after panel explore the potentials of technical and chromatic variations. In so doing, these artworks go beyond the traditional methods of Japanese lacquer art, which they enrich with new materials, novel effects and an expanded perception. The serial and experimental conception of the sequence is sometimes reminiscent of the small square sample boards on which the artists in Asian lacquer workshops exemplarily document the repertoire of techniques which they have mastered and developed.
Back to the origins
Within this complex of works, which now numbers over fifty panels and is continually undergoing expansion to include new variations, three panels make direct reference to the utilised substance and its origins, thus thematising the material per se. The panel The Lacquer Tree is composed of several wooden planks sawn from a lacquer tree. Presented here in their unprocessed state, these boards stand for themselves and for the lacquer tree’s ability to produce an incomparable secretion which, when refined into lacquer, has significantly shaped East Asian culture and spread as far as Europe and even the New World. In its pattern of densely staggered and upwardly widening strokes distributed evenly across the surface, the panel Scratching Lacquer illustrates the successive process of collecting lacquer, just as it has been done for millennia. The panel The Resident Colour shows the natural exudation as it gradually acquires its inherent brown to brown-black colour after having emerged from the tree’s bark and gone through a polymerisation process triggered by oxygen in the air. With these three panels, Brethouwer calls to mind the underlying material, which he explicitly names and celebrates in its autonomous presence, just as the entire, large complex of his artworks can be understood as an homage to lacquer.
In the modernist tradition
At the same time, these panels bring together several tendencies in the development of twentieth-century art. First and foremost is the principle of monochrome abstraction, which initially culminated in Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square (1913/1915) and Alexander Rodchenko’s trilogy Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour (1921) and was later absolutized as a concept in 1960 in Yves Klein’s Blue, which went on to become the icon of monochrome par excellence. Their “pure colour” is always articulated in a rectangular format or, if not in this geometric shape, then as a “pure square” à la Malevich. No less than the monochromatic form of expression, the turn to a square picture format is a constant in modern art. Josef Albers even elevated it to serve as the maxim of his painterly oeuvre and erected the greatest monument to it in the form of his endless series Homage to the Square (1949-1973). With his ambitious complex of works, Brethouwer similarly continues the concept of a series that develops and intensifies over decades. He adheres to the square format and almost always remains faithful to the monochrome, yet simultaneously gives unlimited scope to the primacy of variation within a predefined uniformity. The conceptual approach, the meaning and planning of the work, take centre stage. Brethouwer’s presentation of a sequence of panels dedicated to the genius of Japanese lacquer, which illuminate all conceivable aspects of this material in a sweeping gesture, occupies an exceptional position in the grand concert of these artistic currents because this series – and none other – transfers the guiding principles of modern art into the medium of lacquer.