Displaying items by tag: folding screens

Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of the enterprise software company, Oracle, has loaned a portion of his inimitable collection of Japanese art to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco for the exhibition In the Moment: Japanese Art from the Larry Ellison Collection. The show presents 64 objects that span over 1,000 years.

Highlights from the show include significant works by well-known artists of the Momoyama (1573-1615) and Edo (1615-1868) periods as well as important examples of religious art, lacquer, woodwork and metalwork. Ellison assembled a large portion of his collection with the help of the Asian Art Museum’s former director, Emily Sano. Serving as Ellison’s personal art curator and advisor, Sano helped the billionaire acquire hundreds of important Japanese art objects including 17^th century folding screens by Kano Sansetsu and 18^th century paintings by Maruyama Okyo.

In the Moment: Japanese Art from the Larry Ellison Collection will be on view at the Asian Art Museum through September 22, 2013.

On April 2, 2013, the exhibition Japanese Masterpieces will open in Osaka, Japan. The show, which was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, is in the midst of a 15-month tour of Japan. Works on view include a 1,300-year-old Buddhist painting; rare folding screens; treasured Japanese scroll paintings; and many other rare works. While all of the objects are part of the MFA’s illustrious collection of Japanese art, the exhibition will not be shown in Boston. In fact, many of the works from the museum’s impressive collection remain out of the public’s view.

The MFA does present a selection of their Japanese art holdings on a rotating basis in their galleries, but limited display space and the works’ sensitivity to light means a large portion the collection remains in storage. While the museum did mount a new display of Japanese art in January 2013, when the works from Japanese Masterpieces return to Boston this summer, they will not be exhibited.

The MFA began working on Japanese Masterpieces over 15 years ago when a number of Japanese scholars traveled to the MFA to work with the museum’s curators. The team analyzed the MFA’s Japanese art collection and launched a significant conservation project, which was geared at the current show. Japanese Masterpieces was organized in collaboration with the Tokyo National Museum and has been on view at three venues so far. Attendance has already surpassed one million visitors. The show will be on view in Osaka through June 16, 2013.