Displaying items by tag: lacquer

Combining fashion and film, the spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute will be "China: Through the Looking Glass," the museum said Thursday during a preview in Beijing.

The show will run from May 7 to Aug. 16 in the Met's Chinese Galleries and in the Anna Wintour Costume Center. It will feature more than 130 fashions juxtaposed with traditional Chinese art pieces in jade, lacquer and porcelain.

The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands purchased a rare antique Japanese chest once used as a television stand for $9.5 million. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum had been searching for the 17^th century lacquer chest, one of only ten in the world, since 1941.

The saga of the chest began in 1640 when the head of the Dutch East India Company’s Japanese office commissioned the chest along with three others just like it. All four of the chests were later sold to a French diplomat who passed two of the works off to the British poet William Beckford. Beckford, whose daughter was married to the Duke of Hamilton, inherited the chests and they became part of the Hamilton Palace’s collection. During a sale in 1882 to raise funds for the palace’s upkeep, the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased one of the chests while the other eventually went missing. What the museum didn’t know was that an unassuming Shell Oil engineer had purchased the missing chest in 1970 for a mere $150. The elusive chest was used as everything from a television stand to a storage cabinet until auctioneer Philippe Rouillac and his brother, Aymeric, recognized it.  

While the Victoria & Albert Museum would have liked to have been able to bid on the chest when it went to auction, they simply didn’t have the funds. Julia Hutt, curator of the V&A’s East Asian department, said, “I was delighted to hear the Rijksmuseum had won the auction – it is a very fitting home for the chest.”

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.