The Price Collection, Jakuchu and the Age of Imagination is turning out to be the astonishingly popular traveling exhibition from the Shin’enKan Foundation. It’s a real triumph for Joe and Etsuko Price, who single-handedly curated world attention for Edo-period painters such as Itoh Jakuchu (1716-1800) long dismissed even by Japanese art historians. Joe was first attracted to Japanese art while apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Price Tower for Joe’s father in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
I’ve been a huge fan of the Prices ever since first getting to know them at the Japan America Society of Southern California in the 90s. JAS Director Doug Erber reports that Joe has become a sidewalk celebrity in Japan, mobbed by teenagers wherever he goes.
Joe describes the collection is his own words, on the exhibition website.
The art in the Price Collection is free from the overtones of religion, intellectual nuances, or overbearing stylistic conventions. The works are so coupled with the heart of Nature that can they appeal to people from all walks of life--no scholarly explanations needed. This I hope explains how an engineer from Oklahoma could fall so in love with the images.
I assembled the collection simply by appreciating the visual appeal of the paintings. The quality of beauty and precision of line were dominant, consistent aspects of the art. I collected the art uninhibited by outside teachings. My inability to speak or read Japanese certainly turned out to be an advantage, for it forced me to select the screens and scrolls based on the artists' skills, not their seals or signatures. Even today, when I find a painting, I seldom ask who created it. When a work has great quality, a great artist produced it. Serious Edo artists received unparalleled and meticulous training, and with their skill, ability, and great pride in their accomplishments, their paintings should have some mark, some stroke beyond the capabilities of ordinary men. There is no need to look at a seal to know that a scroll was created by a master.
What may have started out as an insignificant hobby has now turned into something much more meaningful to me. My collection gave my life a new purpose… more
I’m looking for a piece I wrote on Shin’enKan about 15 years ago. Meanwhile, here’s a review from TokyoArtBeat when the show was at the Tokyo National Museum (July/August 2006) --packing the gallery like a “rush hour train.” It was also at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and the Kyushi National Museum. After Japan, the exhibit moves to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in autumn 2007.
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art
Nagoya, Japan
Apr 13, 2007 - Jun 10, 2007
Exhibit blog (in Japanese)
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