Clay Nation

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

There's not a loser in this show, but if you insist that visits to the Art Museum must be educational as well as delightful, you can have that, too. "The Art of Japanese Craft: 1875 to the Present" occupies three smallish galleries on the second floor of the PMA — just turn right at the teahouse.

One point of interest: All the work was collected by one man, Frederick R. McBrien III. He's not a scholar of Japanese art — though he could pass for one — but a man who chooses objects because they appeal to him. Growing up in California, he "felt Japan as a presence"; perhaps more significantly, McBrien spent summers in Pennsylvania, and a couple of times every year his mother brought him to the PMA. She favored Western painting, which he says he still loves. But his deepest interest, cultivated by Philadelphia's great crafts expert Helen Drutt, who encouraged his interest in clay, is Japanese material-based art.

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The first Japanese piece he purchased, a bronze Vase with Design of Ivy made by Kobayashi Shoun (circa 1915, pictured), echoes Chinese vase shapes in its angular flaring top. Soft red autumnal leaves curl against the dark unpolished metal surface in subtle naturalistic relief. We see in this first acquisition McBrien's mature style as a collector. He says he admires the Japanese ability to "reduce a thing to its essence" and make it "just so." His eye similarly has a predilection for perfectly proportioned, natural forms, spatial refinement and a delicate but decisive use of color.

Adjacent to the ivy vase is a low, two-panel Screen with Design of Acacia (1930s) of raised and colored lacquer on wood. The almost Egyptian-looking inverted red rose and white fans of acacia nod gently and are again emphasized by very low relief. How graceful and effortless it seems.

Every piece in this show relates directly to nature, from numerous flowers — including a fine, carved orchid screen — to a veritable menagerie. Kusube Yaichi's white domed porcelain box recalls the soft, rounded shape of the rabbit the Japanese believe lives in the moon. On the other hand, Ota Ryohei's carved wood Rabbit Gazing at the Moon is realistic and perfectly observed. And there are carp of clay, a snail on a leaf, a phoenix and deer. Materials include lacquer, metals, clay and wood.

Though McBrien is not a collector of painting per se, there's one rich but minimal waterfall-painted scroll by Shindo Reimei and impressive painting on many objects, including screens. 

Most of the pieces in the show, plus others not currently displayed, are "promised gifts" to the museum, though McBrien is for now only lending Miyagawa Kozan's almost-rococo blue chrysanthemum vase. The collection as a whole is interesting for Westerners because it encompasses the period when virtually every European and American painter, every printmaker, and every designer of jewelry and furniture and glass was enamored of Japanese arts. The dealer, Siegfried Bing, whose gallery L'Art Nouveau gave its name to a whole style, began his career as an expert on Japanese art.

It's easy to forget that the Japanese, who exhibited their work at numerous world's fairs, also saw Western art and were, in turn, fascinated. They admired William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, for example. McBrien's focused modern (period) collection documents that cross-pollination, as does the thoughtful and important catalog essay by Felice Fischer, Luther W. Brady curator of Japanese art and curator of East Asian art at the PMA.

The catalog also documents the writings and markings on the wooden storage boxes designed uniquely for each work at the time it was made — containers that are themselves works of art. Someday, it would be fun to see an exhibition devoted to them with the contents displayed as secondary objects.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)