A rare flower basket by Kyoto-based artist Higashi Takesonosai. Takesonosai's abstract yet inviting, innovative and extremely technical exhibition-scale works were favored by Lloyd Cotsen, whose collection established Japanese bamboo art as an international phenomenon in the early 2000s. In Takesonosai's last years, Cotsen bought all that he made. These remarkable works were featured in the book The Bamboo Art of Higashi Takesonosai (Art Media Limited Resources, 2002). They form a cornerstone of Cotsen's collection of 8000+ baskets donated to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

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So assiduously collected by Cotsen, Takesonosai's works rarely surface in public--this is the first full-size flower basket that we have seen outside of that collection. Certainly it is his interpretation of the thousand-line baskets of Iizuka Rokansai (1890-1958). Rokansai most commonly made such baskets from either light-colored shirasabi (leached, white bamboo) or very dark, nearly black-colored bamboo, in either case the straight lines and geometric form lending them an austere elegance. Here Takesonosai used a beautiful, richly colored susudake (smoked madake). The color is lovely, the nodes are distributed like falling rain drops across the face; Takesonosai brings an easy feeling and new warmth to the form.