PRICE COLLECTION--AN AIRING AT LACMA

Who says you can’t look gift horses in the mouth? Everybody knows that the horse’s mouth is the place whence cometh the straight truth. Today the orifice in question is that containing the cache of Japanese art of the Edo period donated to the County Museum of Art by Oklahoma collector Joe D. Price. After considerable fanfaronade but no solid fare, we are at last treated to a look at some highlights of the collection in a selection of some 75 objects on view to May 18.

For many a moon now, LACMA has been in a dither over this gift, calling it the finest thing of its kind in Christendom--or Buddhadom or Mohammedom for that matter. The minions of the museum swagger a little in just thinking about the fact that the 300-odd scrolls and screens in the Price collection will make their store a planetary center for the study of Japanese art. (The term world-class has become exhausted from overuse by museum directors.)

And as if that all were not enough, those who seek the wisdom, enlightenment and pleasure offered by this art will ultimately do so in a rather funny-looking but unique pavilion to be erected to house the collection. It was designed by the late architect Bruce Goff with the idea of re-creating the original viewing conditions for this art. Each piece will be seen in isolation because the Japanese intended these often sumptuous works to go one to a room. They will also be seen in the soft, fictive light that comes from the sun filtering through the translucent paper walls of the traditional Japanese room. (Thanks to miraculous modern technology, flimsy paper will be replaced with a durable modern plastic called Kalwall.)

Anyway, all that is a couple of years up the road. For now there is plenty to keep us bemused in the basement of the Ahmanson Building where the highlights exhibition is installed in a respectfully crepuscular light that allows the gold backgrounds of several screens to give off an enchanted, whispering luster. Are we disappointed after all that hoopla?

On the contrary. Price seems to have an eye like a laser, and if it were not deemed disrespectful to term such venerable art “boffo,” one would do so. Rarely has a people developed a tradition with so much visual pizazz tempered by such exquisite taste. All that really remains to do here is rhapsodize with as much accuracy as possible and point out that while Price’s cache is surely the finest thing of its kind, it is not the only possible thing of its kind, a proposition the collector supports in his engaging catalogue essay.

The Edo Period endured from about 1615 to 1865, a decade after Commodore Perry arrived in his black iron vessels that moved without sails. Initially, it was a period when the samurai warriors took control of the country from the Buddhist aristocracy and shut down its ports to foreign visitors. That seems a trifle inhospitable, but it afforded the Japanese a nice breathing space to develop a distinctive culture out of what had been a tradition dominated by foreign influences, mainly Chinese. It produced a bumper crop of indigenous art forms, from the Kabuki theater to ceramics, lacquer ware and flower arrangement to a brace of painting styles including surviving Buddhist and Zen styles and the scholar painters of the Nanga school. These chaps tended to value art of highly spontaneous appearance that had a purposefully amateurish cast.

Joe D. Price was a simple country boy from Bartlesville, Okla. Well, not exactly simple. His family was in oil and his father commissioned the now-renowned Price Tower from Frank Lloyd Wright. Joe received some aesthetic instruction at his knee, but he was formally trained as an engineer. When he first encountered Japanese art in the ‘50s, he had no formal art schooling. (He still has none, but you’d never know it from the breadth of his knowledge and the pith of his insight.)

Anyway, he was mesmerized by a certain kind of Japanese art that was then very much out of fashion and found he could afford it if he scrimped. Ceramics and lacquer ware were already out of his range and he was not particularly attracted to the artists who went out of their way to look sloppy and casual. What grabbed his engineer’s eye was an art of almost unbelievable skill and virtuosity. Its masters were not allowed to put brush to paper until they had practiced for decades. Its great works had a patent artificiality that yet seemed to mirror nature and improve upon it.

Thus the Price collection emphasizes certain qualities that came under suspicion during the dominance of avant-garde modernism in the West. It exudes an aura of luxury that first embodied the taste of the upstart samurai and later mirrored the ambitions of the merchant class, who were considered the dregs of Japanese society but became very rich and were not above reminding people of the fact by surrounding themselves with such sumptuous objects as huge 12-panel gold-ground screens. (The gold, incidentally, was not all vulgar display. It tended to reflect light in the rather dim interiors of the time.)

Westerners suckled on Modernist aesthetics can also be forgiven for wincing at the incredible slickness of the work. There is something about this degree of virtuosity that is both impressive and off-putting because it can make art seem more like an athletic feat than the expression of spiritual struggle we have come to expect.

However, when we come to look at the Price collection, qualities both internal and external make such resistance seem merely stubborn and silly. For one thing, it lines up with the modernist tradition, precisely because modernism was so profoundly influenced by it in its own beginnings. This exhibition ends with a brace of works by 18th-Century individualists-- a highly relative term in tradition-laden Japanese art.

Among them is the great Ito Jakuchu, who was given to such an odd practice as that seen in two six-fold screens of “Birds, Animals and Flowering Plants.” Perversely, Jakuchu set himself the task of making the whole thing look like a mosaic, an attack so eccentric that only one other work like it exists in the whole history of Japanese art. The effect, however, is very much that of a modernist naif somewhere between early Kandinsky and the Douanier Rousseau--neither of whom ever managed anything more charming than Jakuchu’s sweet and slightly petulant white elephant.

If any more proof of the kinship between Modernism and Japan is required, the viewer is referred to Jakuchu’s black-and-white “Figures, Birds and Flowers” or his dramatic “Eagle.” Eat your heart out, Pierre Bonnard. Blush with your hand caught in the cookie jar, you Artiste Nouveau, you Parisian Abstract Expressionist.

Centuries before we figured it out, the Japanese had realized that art is an expression of life translated into art’s own language, its colors, patterns, shapes and lines. Their results may be overridingly decorative, witty and dramatic but they would be little more than highfalutin illustration were it not for the Japanese artists’ ability to infuse them with poetry.

I can’t write haiku, but anyone who can might render most of these works as pithy verse. An early anonymous “Ginkgo Trees and Fish Trap” suggests something like, “Crabs dance an armored waltz while fog enshrouds them in golden fleece.” Another anonymous 17th-Century screen seems to say, “Spring plum blossoms explode like the last white snowstorm.”

It’s lovely stuff that rhymes on through the delicate color-in-wash scrolls of the Rimpa school, whose flowers exist somewhere between reality and the exquisite artificiality of jade imitations. Sometimes they are as stylish and funny as Suzuki Kiitsu’s cranes, who walk on the shore like ladies from an exclusive club, or as startling as Nagasawa Rosetsu’s tiger, whose smiling earless shrewdness makes him all the more terrifying.

The exhibition is titled “Masterpieces From the Shin’enkan Collection.” Shin’enkan means “House of the faraway heart,” which is what Jakuchu called his studio. With the Price collection here it becomes the house of the nearby heart, which is less poignant but more satisfying. If anything, the ensemble reminds us that art that brings pleasure need not be less profound that pleasure itself.