The Top Collections from 250 Collectors
March 2008
ASIAN ART: Etsuko and Joe Price
Japanese Naturalism
Etsuko and Joe Price collect exclusively Japanese Edo-period (1615–1868) art. "I don’t like the earlier Japanese paintings, as they were mostly copied from China, and I don’t like the later ones either, as then painters were too influenced by Western art," says the Corona del Mar, California, collector in explanation of his attraction to the period. "In Edo [now Tokyo] the educated people were not the rulers. Merchants and samurai, previously farmers, were in charge. For me they symbolize the pure Japanese heritage of thousands of years."
More than 50 years ago, Price bought his first work of Japanese art, a hanging scroll depicting elegant grapevines, at a Madison Avenue antiques shop. "I didn’t even know the artist’s name," he says. The work exercised such an influence over him that he continued to acquire Japanese scrolls and screens, buying, he says, "just what I liked with no concern for provenance." In the late 1960s, after seeing a book of the Imperial Collection in Tokyo, Price discovered that one of the painters whose works he admired was Ito Jakuchu (1716–1800). "To my complete surprise, I already owned some of his scrolls and screens," he says. Today, Jakuchu is the dominant painter in his collection, a radically idiosyncratic master who didn’t just depict nature, but, as Price notes, "improved it, made it worth looking at" by personifying his birds and animals, giving them almost human identities.
A remarkable pair of 200-year-old six-panel folding screen paintings, "Birds, Animals and Flowering Plants," is among the most accomplished of Jakuchu’s paintings, and one of the most puzzling. Why did the artist use a labor-intensive mosaic technique—43,000 tiny squares of color, and in the center of each square there appears to be a smaller square of a different color—for these screens and no others? According to Price, Jakuchu certainly never saw an elephant or some of the other creatures he depicted in the screens, a poetic fantasy of exotic animals and birds coexisting. One of Price’s theories about this work is that the artist may have used the mosaic technique as a signal to the viewer. "He’s basically telling us that this is his interpretation of what he imagines is true," he says. "As he usually painted from life, he is trying to differentiate this work from his still-life paintings."
Price credits his intense feelings about works of art related to the natural environment to the prairie walks he took as a young man with Frank Lloyd Wright, who was designing an office building for Price’s father’s oil pipeline business. "Wright taught me to spell nature with a capital N and that’s what I see in Japanese art, especially during the Edo period."
About half of the Price collection is usually on loan while the rest is stored in a study center in his home and available to scholars of Japanese art. "When scholars visit, we bring out the paintings they would like to see. Our scrolls and screens were meant to be seen one at a time in different light intensities—from sunlight to moonlight," he says, noting that Japanese homes had a small alcove called a tokonoma where the head of the household would select one painting each morning for the day’s viewing. Price is honored that nearly one million people viewed his collection when it was on a four-museum tour in Japan last year, and he is convinced they came in such large numbers because the museums worked very hard to ensure that the lighting on some of the art changed from daylight to moonlight every three minutes. "It was a revelation because for the first time, people could see the work as it was meant to be seen, not under glaring overhead lighting," he says.
In the current show, "Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters from the Price Collection" (Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., through April 13), some of the special lighting also simulates changes from daylight to moonlight. The Price Collection will be next be on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from June 22 to September 14. —Bobbie Leigh
Japanese Naturalism
Etsuko and Joe Price collect exclusively Japanese Edo-period (1615–1868) art. "I don’t like the earlier Japanese paintings, as they were mostly copied from China, and I don’t like the later ones either, as then painters were too influenced by Western art," says the Corona del Mar, California, collector in explanation of his attraction to the period. "In Edo [now Tokyo] the educated people were not the rulers. Merchants and samurai, previously farmers, were in charge. For me they symbolize the pure Japanese heritage of thousands of years."
More than 50 years ago, Price bought his first work of Japanese art, a hanging scroll depicting elegant grapevines, at a Madison Avenue antiques shop. "I didn’t even know the artist’s name," he says. The work exercised such an influence over him that he continued to acquire Japanese scrolls and screens, buying, he says, "just what I liked with no concern for provenance." In the late 1960s, after seeing a book of the Imperial Collection in Tokyo, Price discovered that one of the painters whose works he admired was Ito Jakuchu (1716–1800). "To my complete surprise, I already owned some of his scrolls and screens," he says. Today, Jakuchu is the dominant painter in his collection, a radically idiosyncratic master who didn’t just depict nature, but, as Price notes, "improved it, made it worth looking at" by personifying his birds and animals, giving them almost human identities.
A remarkable pair of 200-year-old six-panel folding screen paintings, "Birds, Animals and Flowering Plants," is among the most accomplished of Jakuchu’s paintings, and one of the most puzzling. Why did the artist use a labor-intensive mosaic technique—43,000 tiny squares of color, and in the center of each square there appears to be a smaller square of a different color—for these screens and no others? According to Price, Jakuchu certainly never saw an elephant or some of the other creatures he depicted in the screens, a poetic fantasy of exotic animals and birds coexisting. One of Price’s theories about this work is that the artist may have used the mosaic technique as a signal to the viewer. "He’s basically telling us that this is his interpretation of what he imagines is true," he says. "As he usually painted from life, he is trying to differentiate this work from his still-life paintings."
Price credits his intense feelings about works of art related to the natural environment to the prairie walks he took as a young man with Frank Lloyd Wright, who was designing an office building for Price’s father’s oil pipeline business. "Wright taught me to spell nature with a capital N and that’s what I see in Japanese art, especially during the Edo period."
About half of the Price collection is usually on loan while the rest is stored in a study center in his home and available to scholars of Japanese art. "When scholars visit, we bring out the paintings they would like to see. Our scrolls and screens were meant to be seen one at a time in different light intensities—from sunlight to moonlight," he says, noting that Japanese homes had a small alcove called a tokonoma where the head of the household would select one painting each morning for the day’s viewing. Price is honored that nearly one million people viewed his collection when it was on a four-museum tour in Japan last year, and he is convinced they came in such large numbers because the museums worked very hard to ensure that the lighting on some of the art changed from daylight to moonlight every three minutes. "It was a revelation because for the first time, people could see the work as it was meant to be seen, not under glaring overhead lighting," he says.
In the current show, "Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters from the Price Collection" (Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., through April 13), some of the special lighting also simulates changes from daylight to moonlight. The Price Collection will be next be on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from June 22 to September 14. —Bobbie Leigh
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