Flowers of the Four Seasons: Japanese Art at Berkeley Art Museum

Source: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
One of the most significant collections of Japanese art in North America will pay its first visit to the Bay Area for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s major fall 2010 exhibition, Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture. BAM/PFA will display over 110 works of art from the Clark Center of Hanford, California. The exhibition reflects the broad collecting interests of the Center’s founder Willard G. Clark. His passion for Japanese art and culture has resulted in a collection ranging from the late Heian period (794–1185) to the twenty-first century, including all major areas of artistic endeavor—screens, scrolls, wood sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and works of bamboo

Clark studied architecture at UC Berkeley and animal husbandry at UC Davis in the early 1950s. He started his art collection with modestly priced purchases of art on his several visits to Japan from Hawai’i where he was stationed as a young officer in the United States Navy. After his release from the military in 1963, he took charge of the family business, quintupled its size, and embarked on an even more successful venture exporting bull semen overseas. As Clark’s businesses grew, so did the size and scope of his immense art collection. In 1995 he founded the Clark Center, a museum for Japanese art, to better protect these precious works and to make them available for public viewing. From 2002 to 2003 highlights from the collection traveled to five cities in Japan, including Tokyo and Osaka, where they were admired by thousands of visitors. Given the Center’s relative remoteness, too few in the United States have had a chance to view this important collection. The BAM/PFA exhibition will change this by presenting to the public the most significant pieces from each of the key areas of the collection.

Much of the Flowers of the Four Seasons exhibition comprises work from the Edo, or pre-modern, period (1603–1868). The hanging scrolls and folding screens on display portray a variety of subjects; playful images of urban life, the elegant diversions of nobility, portraits of Buddha, natural and idealized landscapes, flora, birdlife, and other animals. The overall effect of this variety of imagery is a remarkable view of the artistic creativity in Edo Japan.

Wood and polychromy Buddhist sculptures, dating from the Heian period to the Kamakura period (1185–1333), are the oldest pieces in the exhibition. Moving forward in time, a portion of the exhibition focuses on late-twentieth century bamboo sculpture. Japanese farmers and artisans plaited bamboo for hundreds of years, but it wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that bamboo began to be thought of as a sculptural medium in its own right. Flowers of the Four Seasons highlights signature works of some of the most significant modern bamboo sculptors including Ueno Masao, Mimura Chikuhō, Nagakura Ken’ichi, and Uematsu Chikuyū. Contemporary artist Fukami Sueharu’s collection of light blue ceramic sculptures, with sleek edges and softly contoured planes that evoke sword blades or ocean waves, round out the exhibition and demonstrate that Clark’s interests encompass both the past and the future of Japanese art.