The Age of Imagination: Japanese Art, 1615-1868, from the Price Collection

 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art    June 22 – September 14     5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles  (323) 857-6000 www.lacma.org

 

Cultural News, July 2008

 

 

Kitagawa Sosetsu (n.d.) Poppies, Thistles, and Chinese Milk Vetches (detail) Edo period, 17th century, Hanging scroll, © Shin’enkan 2007

 

      Acquired over the past five decades, the Price collection commemorates painting of the Edo period, a time when Japan had purposefully cut itself off from extensive contact with the rest of the world. During that period of national seclusion, independent and diversely creative artists flourished as never before.

 

      At the core of The Age of Imagination: Japanese Art, 1615-1868, from the Price Collection are screens, hanging scrolls, fans and some of the finest examples of the distinctive, hauntingly preternatural renderings of animal life by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800). Jakuchu’s prominence in recent decades has been greatly aided by the Prices' intensive interest in his work.

 

      The exhibition, as a whole, provides an outstanding representation of the diversity that characterized painting production in the Edo period.

 

      The collection of Etsuko and Joe Price is considered one of the finest private collections of Japanese art in the world and includes more Japanese folding screens than any other collection.

 

     Throughout the length of the three-month exhibition, several works will be rotated to accommodate the scale of the collection and provide protection for light-sensitive works.

 

     Public lecture “Ito Jakuchu” by Money Hickman, guest curator of this exhibition, will take place on Sunday, July 20, 2 p.m. at Brown Auditorium.

 

   Money Hickman, former research curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will discuss the long, productive career of Ito Jakuchu.

 

    LACMA is closed Wednesday. Admission is $12 for adults. But, admission is free the second Tuesday of every month, and every evening after 5 p.m.