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Published: 2007

Total Pages: 276

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Joe Price purchased his first Japanese painting in the 1950s, under the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright. Over the next five decades, he and his wife Etsuko would collect more than 200 masterpieces from the Edo period (1615-1868), a time when Japan had isolated itself from the rest of the world. Curiously, during that period of national seclusion, independent and diversely creative artists flourished as never before. Today, the Etsuko and Joe Price Collection is placed among the finest in the world. The detailed patterns evident in many of the works reflect the high regard artists of the period held for textile designers. The expressiveness in the eyes of the various animals, demons, deities, and people depicted suggest that they all inhabited the same world rather than different spiritual levels- the prominent religious theory of the time.The animal world becomes more animated, landscapes have their own light, spirits are alive, past becomes present, evoking a mood that suggests familiarity with all worlds, above and below. At the collection's core 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), one of the most innovative and imaginative of Kyoto's eighteenth-century painters. Jakuchu's prominence in recent decades has been greatly aided by the Price's intensive interest in his work.