"Old Noritake: Bridging Beauty of East & West" Exhibition
The Nippon Gallery
This event has ended.
In 1982, an exhibition of Japanese porcelain from the collection of Washington University art professor and Noritake porcelain enthusiast Dr. Howard Kottler took to the road touring the United States. This first exhibition marked the beginning of a gradual reevaluation of the artistic merits of the Japanese export porcelain known as “Old Noritake.” Presently, such exhibits have become popular at places such as public art museums back in Japan. Many of the ceramic techniques used during the Meiji period no longer exist today due to industrialization and various social changes. However, the pieces in this exhibition give us a fairly clear picture even today about how the porcelain painters of that era worked. All of this forces us to confront the question: “If Old Noritake was increasingly driven to create products with ever-greater uniformity, how are we to understand the artistic identity and distinction in the originality of Old Noritake?” The answer is that Old Noritake is “original” in many senses. It was of course influenced by Western designs and occasionally copied them outright, but to these it added value using the significant artistic traditions and techniques of potters from Seto and Mino, Japan’s best porcelain production regions. As such, Old Noritake’s “originality” came from a combination of “best quality”, “high production numbers” and a degree of “superior uniformity”. While Old Noritake was influenced by or copied Western design, it was also supported by a strong Japanese craft tradition and was able to bring this to and merge it into American culture. Modern Japanese porcelain displayed at this time can be seen as forming a bridge between both traditional and modern along with the Eastern and Western porcelain worlds. This is a microcosm of the dreams and change that took place in Japanese after the Meiji period.
Media
Schedule
from January 29, 2009 to February 25, 2009