Christ enters Jerusalem by Sadao Watanabe. 1982
Matthew 216-9
In a scene worthy of Hollywood, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a humble donkey, inverting the normal order. I can’t help seeing this story as some kind of ironic divine joke, as though Jesus, teasingly, asks us: ‘You want a king making his triumphal entry into the city, do you? OK, let’s reinterpret what we mean by kingship, triumph, stallion’.
The Japanese word Mingei (民芸) refers to the folk art movement in Japan, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. It describes art made by ordinary people for ordinary people, and it influenced British artists such as William Morris. In this print, Watanabe has, perhaps, accentuated that ordinariness by choosing to use natural pigments and ink on paper hand-made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree. The represented activity is contained within a strong rectangle that is significantly smaller than the two surrounding colours that frame it, suggesting, perhaps, that the event is part of the much larger story.
The firm outlines and the abutting of the complementary colours of red and green, also give the feeling of movement, almost suggesting the clip clop of the donkey’s hooves on the road. Jesus is dressed in green, a colour that symbolises resurrection, as well as also being the colour of nature, of spring and regeneration. In some cultures, green is also associated with death. Some of this ambiguity between life and death is evident in Paul Gauguin’s 1889 painting, Green Christ, in which the green Christ figure appears to be either, or both, alive and dead.
In our Mingei picture, a man looks down on the spectacle from the top of a tree, raising the question as to whether this could be the Zacchaeus who plays a star part in a completely different story. However, in that story, we are led to believe that Zacchaeus was changed by his encounter with Jesus and no longer had any reason to climb into a tree to see him.
Perhaps climbing trees was just the obvious way of gaining a vantage point for looking over crowds. Or maybe the man was simply cutting down branches for the people below to wave. The ground is also littered with rather exotic coats for the donkey to walk over.