The Portland Art Museum Displays Three Centuries of Japanese Prints

Written by Contance Lambert Thursday, 10 May 2012 22:08

Portland, Oregon.-  The Portland Art Museum is proud to present "The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum" on view through January 22nd 2012. The Portland Art Museum owns an extensive collection of over 2,500 Japanese prints dating from the late 17th century to the present. This fall through January, the museum will mount its first major exhibition of prints selected from the permanent collection. Some of the more historically important pieces in the exhibit were chosen from the Mary Andrews Ladd collection of 750 traditional woodblock prints which was gifted to the museum in 1932. The exhibit will also feature rare prints by iconic Ukiyo-e artists like Suzuki Harunobu, credited as the first to produce full-colour prints, and Katsushika Hokusai, known for his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Other rare works include privately commissioned surimono prints that were used for special occasions. Quintessential images of Japanese beauties (bijin-ga) and 18th-century prints of actors are stellar examples from the collection.

Works from the 20th century include a series of emotional landscapes and devastated cityscapes showing the tragic aftermath of the Great Kanto- Earthquake of 1923. Examples of artistic styles from the Post-War period are reflected in prints like Kunihiro Amano’s 1975 Op Art piece Lost Past #4. Japanese prints have been integral to the identity of the Portland Art Museum since 1932 when the Museum was given more than 750 traditional woodblock prints from the collection of Mary Andrews Ladd. Since then, the Museum’s collection has grown to more than 2,500 works and spans from the late 17th century to the present day. This fall, after three years of intensive research, the Museum will present the first major exhibition to draw exclusively from this remarkable public resource.


The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand will feature a finely honed selection of some 250 of the most historically important and visually compelling Japanese prints in the collection. Visitors will encounter familiar artists such as Harunobu and Hokusai - icons in the history of Japanese printmaking — and the prints will be a revelation, as nearly half of the works in the exhibition are unique or extremely rare. Special strengths in the collection include 18th-century actor prints; surimono, deluxe prints that were privately commissioned; and painterly landscapes of the early 20th century, including a series that documents the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The exhibition will conclude with the new developments of the Post-War period, from Op Art and Abstract Expressionism to lyrical evocations of an imagined past.


Founded in late 1892, the Portland Art Museum is the seventh oldest museum in the United States and the oldest in the Pacific Northwest. The Museum is internationally recognized for its permanent collection and ambitious special exhibitions, drawn from the Museum’s holdings and the world’s finest public and private collections. The Museum’s collection of more than 42,000 objects, displayed in 112,000 square feet of galleries, reflects the history of art from ancient times to today. The collection is distinguished for its holdings of arts of the native peoples of North America, English silver, and the graphic arts. An active collecting institution, the Museum devotes 90 percent of its galleries to the permanent collection. Since its founding in 1892, the Museum has amassed a significant collection of American paintings and sculptures. Located on the second level of the Belluschi Building, the collection has grown primarily through gifts and key purchases of works by artists of national acclaim. Arranged chronologically, the American art collection provides an overview of the history of American art. Early portraits by Gilbert Stuart and Erastus Salisbury Field join acknowledged late 19th–century masterworks such as the magnificent Mount Hood by Albert Bierstadt, The Sculptor and the King by George de Forest Brush, and Thomas Moran’s The Grand Canal, Venice. The collection also features paintings by the great 19th–century landscape painter, George Inness.

The collection is rich in works by American Impressionists Childe Hassam and J. Alden Weir, including paintings created during their visits to Portland in the early 1900s and Weir’s portrait of Museum founder C.E.S. Wood. Other works from the first half of the 20th century include paintings by artists ranging from Modernists Milton Avery and Marsden Hartley to John Sloan, George Lucks, and other members of the Eight, a group of American artists that united to oppose academism. From its earliest days, the Museum has closely followed and supported contemporary art. In 1908, the Museum acquired its first original painting, created by the American Impressionist Childe Hassam in the same year. In 1905 and 1913, exhibitions of avant-garde art were presented at the Museum, including Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and other momentous works from the controversial 1913 Armory Show in New York.  The Museum began building a collection of 20th-century art in the late 1940s. A 1971 gift of funds in Evan H. Roberts’ name allowed a series of sculpture purchases by artists such as Henry Moore and Mark Di Suvero. In 2000, the Museum acquired the Clement Greenberg Collection of 159 paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures by some of the most important American artists of the mid-20th century. The acquisition, supported by Tom and Gretchen Holce, and Carol and John Hampton, along with a number of major gifts, resulted in a quantum leap in the collection. Today, the collection includes works that date back to World War I and originate from North and South America, Asia, and Europe. The Belluschi Building’s Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Sculpture Court is dedicated to exhibiting large-scale works from the Museum’s holdings. In 2005, the Museum introduced the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art to accommodate the growing collection. Located on all six floors of the Mark Building, the 28,000-square-foot Center was created to present rotating exhibitions of more than 400 modern works from the collection, in addition to special contemporary art exhibitions. Established early in the Museum’s history, the photography holdings then consisted of only a few works. With the addition of a permanent curator of photography in the early 1980s, the collection began to rapidly expand. Today, there are approximately 5,000 works in the collection, which is part of the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts. The majority of images were acquired as gifts, so in a very real sense the collection is a product of the Museum’s community. These images reflect the varied photographic interests of hundreds of individuals whose efforts and gifts have helped shape the collection. One of the earliest acquisitions was a complete 20–volume set of Edward Sheriff Curtis’s masterwork, The North American Indian. In 1942, the Works Progress

Administration of the Federal Art Projects placed a large collection of Minor White’s photographs of Portland on permanent loan. Over the past 20 years, the Museum has also accepted gifts from various donors of more than 50 postwar photographs by White. The Museum has placed particular emphasis on the acquisition of images that chronicle photography in Oregon and the West, adding to work by Group f/64 organizers Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham, and tracing a decade-by–decade profile of photographic accomplishments by both acknowledged masters and the under–recognized. Of particular note are in–depth holdings of work by Myra Wiggins, Lily White, and Sarah Ladd, associate members of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo–Secession Movement, who lived and worked in Salem and Portland at the turn of the 20th century, as well as a rich selection of images reflecting the life work of Al Monner and Todd Walker. The collection also includes works by noted contemporary photographers, including Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems, Robert Adams, Elliot Erwitt, Dianne Kornberg, and Joel Sternfeld. The museum also hosts major collections of Asian and Native American art as well as a collection of more than 100 pieces of silver, ranging from a 15th-century drinking bowl to a spectacular Rococo cup and cover with maker’s marks of Lewis Herne and Francis Butty. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.portlandartmuseum.org

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