Koetsu died at 79 in 1637, laden with the esteem of patrons and connoisseurs.
Koetsu's is as new a species in spacing as Shakespeare's is a new species in drama.
Unlike Rikyu, though, Koetsu got his hands dirty, shaping the clay, carving it with knife and spatula.
There is an inverse relationship between the size of Koetsu's work and the scale of his cultural resonance.
Koetsu's name is also associated with lacquer, another of the chief Japanese arts.
But in the end Koetsu is one of those artists who elude classifications, even those of his own time and place.
Koetsu once sold his house to raise the money 30 gold coins for a particularly famous old tea caddy he yearned to buy.
Koetsu's work, given the accumulated Japanese reactions to it, is perhaps the ultimate example of the power of the small, the exquisite, the almost marginal.
But Koetsu ended his days in dignified security, as the quasi-religious head of a community at Takagamine, near Kyoto, part artists' colony and part monkish village.
It is not certain how Koetsu managed to find a place within this society as one of its principal tastemakers as, in a sense, its artistic director.
Like Rikyu before him, Koetsu worked with a family of potters whose name came to stand for a whole class of rough, low-fired pottery: raku ware.
It is still a surprise, for people used to the immaculate technical refinement of Sevres or Wedgwood, to see the lack of finish of Koetsu tea bowls.
It rose from collaboration among Koetsu, the painter Sotatsu, a suitably skilled papermaker, and not least the dead hand of the poet whose waka, or classic verses, Koetsu was transcribing.
The role wasn't a complete sinecure: the ruling warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, ordered the seppuku, or ritual suicide, of one of Koetsu's circle, the tea master Furuta Oribe, for some real or imagined disloyalty.
And Koetsu's calligraphies on sheets of paper pasted together, paper made in the subtlest imaginable tints and textures, a salmon pink abutting the most delicate smoky blue, display a sensibility that seems an etherealized version of Georges Braque's.
Koetsu was the first Japanese to sign one of his own tea bowls the famous "Fuji" bowl, now designated a national treasure by the Japanese and hence unable to be shown in the U.S. but he never ran his own kiln.
Koetsu's sources reached back hundreds of years, and yet his way of writing "fat and thin" characters, some bold and emphatic and others trailing to the faintest visual whisper, was peculiarly his own (at least among Japanese calligraphers) and difficult to emulate.
Some of the most beautiful things in this show are the shikisi, or poem cards, in which the visual form of Koetsu's writing chimes wonderfully with the loops and eddies of Sotatsu's water, the spikes of his plant stems and the slow blur of his distant mountains.
These tiny, fugitive-looking images, in which luminous fragments of nature pines bowing before a wind, the undulation of a flock of cranes were painted in colored inks on handmade paper by his collaborator Tawaraya Sotatsu and then written over by Koetsu, have acquired, for Japanese taste, the sort of cardinal importance that a fresco cycle or an altarpiece might have for ours.
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