Exhibitions

Japanese woodblock prints: tradition and innovation

For Vincent Van Gogh, Japan represented an image of utopia where people lived artistically, in harmony with nature. The Japanese sense of nature, where nature and human are recognized as an integrated whole, has indeed deeply affected the style, form, and expression of the country’s artistic traditions, including woodblock prints. Woodblock print artists, however, were not simply conservative practitioners carrying on a tradition, but were highly innovative in their own right, incorporating new painting techniques and visual effects, such as one-point perspective imported from the West. In this talk, I will reveal the tradition as well as the innovation articulated in Japanese woodblock prints.

This article examines the ways how the formation of the Japanese ceramic collection of Sir William Van Horne (1843-1915) in Montreal was informed by art dealers and the global market of Japanese ceramics in the late 19th to early 20th century. Van Horne’s dealers, based in Japan and the US, played a significant role in the way Van Horne collected and perceived Japanese ceramics, because Van Horne never went to Japan and acquired objects only from them. Van Horne’s decisions about what to collect were not simply determined by his own judgment, but were also affected by external factors such as the availability of Japanese objects in the Western market at the time, and the intellectual landscape and the broad trends within the Euro-American circle of collecting Japanese ceramics. Furthermore, these currents in “collecting Japan” themselves did not occur naturally: they were in fact informed by the intentions, concerns and desires of influential dealers, collectors, and scholars. When looking at the establishment of a collection not only from the collector’s taste, but also from these external factors, a collection can be understood as a complex space in which multiple subjectivities and economies are intertwined.

Contact For further information on this research, please contact: Akiko Takesue How do objects acquire meaning and how does the meaning change? My dissertation, From Japan to Canadian Museum Storage: Shifting Meaning of Objects from the Japanese Ceramics Collection of William Cornelius Van Horne (1843– 1915), looks at how a group of Japanese ceramic objects, collected by Sir William C. Van Horne in late nineteenth century Montreal, have acquired meaning. I examine the shifting meaning of these objects through their spatial and temporal movements from Japan to Canada and from the late nineteenth century to the present. These objects embody interpretational gaps – between a high reputation during the collector’s lifetime, their ambiguous status in the museum storage today and the misidentification of a genuine tea bowl made by prominent potter Nonomura Ninsei (active ca.1646–1677) in the collection.