The recent opening of “Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been generating a bit of media buzz, with the NY Times calling the show “exhilarating in its profusion, range and almost ferocious vitality.”

The Philadelpia Inquirer hailed the first major survery of Taiga’s work as “perhaps the most important in terms of exposing Americans to work that is both top quality and significant to the way Japanese art has evolved over the last two centuries.”

This exhibition includes several works designated as national treasures, including a pair of six-fold screens that are being shown for the first time outside of Japan.

The accompanying catalog, “Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush” , presents the many works of Taiga and Gyokuran and is the only comprehensive survey available in English. This landmark book focuses on the lives and times of these two preeminent 18th-century Japanese artists. The exhibition continues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through July 22, 2007.