Swords as Status in Old Japan
NYTimes.com
By WENDY MOONAN
Published: September 17, 2004
Te sales of Asian art are about to begin in New York, with previews
this weekend of Chinese, Japanese and Korean works at Sotheby's and
Christie's.
Christie's auction of Japanese art on Wednesday has two highlights
worth seeing during the viewings. One is a pair of 17th-century
Japanese six-panel screens that depict the Portuguese on their ships
as they are approaching Japan. The Japanese found the foreigners
strange; they are depicted with red hair, bulging eyes and huge
noses. This cross-cultural art, known as Namban in Japan, is always
worth a look, if only to see how Westerners were viewed when first
encountered.
Christie's is also selling an entire set of Noh theater masks and
robes from an Edo-period (1615-1868) collection. They belonged to a
lord from Yamanouchi Province. Any would-be producers could pick up
enough masks and costumes at this sale to supply an entire Noh
troupe.
Many galleries plan exhibitions to coincide with the auctions, and
the most astonishing show of Japanese work may be the elaborate
Japanese sword fittings at Sebastian Izzard Asian Fine Art, at 17
East 76th Street in Manhattan, from Tuesday through Sept. 30. The
protectors are beaten, patinated, lacquered and adorned with golden
figures from famous Japanese war stories. The workmanship makes
Fabergé look almost amateur.
The sword fittings are from the collection of Alexander G. Moslé, a
German businessman who worked in Japan from 1884 to 1907. As the
representative of the Gruson Company, a subsidiary of Krupp Steel,
Moslé was able to persuade the Japanese government to switch from
French to German arms just as Japan was asserting itself as a
military power. (The first Sino-Japanese War was in 1894-95 and the
Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05.)
The arms trade made Moslé wealthy; at one point he had 2,249
Japanese swords, armor, more than 1,600 sword fittings, Japanese
paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, lacquer and textiles. Moslé
retired in 1907 and returned to Germany, working with scholars and
dealers to learn more about his collection. In 1909 he exhibited it
at the Königliches Kunstgewerbe Museum in Berlin. It was published
in two catalogs in 1914, which are still considered important
reference works.
In the late 1920's, Moslé traveled to the United States to try to
sell his collection to public institutions. He did sell some prints
to the Art Institute of Chicago and some lacquers to the Freer
Gallery of Art in Washington, but, apparently, little more. He was
in the United States in 1941, when America went to war, and was
stranded here. Sometime before his death in 1949, he entered a
mental institution.
His bank organized a sale of his Japanese works at Parke-Bernet in
New York in 1948, including the fittings in this sale. These 170
works have been in private hands since that earlier sale. They
include simple designs made of iron and ceremonial sets embellished
with gold, silver and copper. They range in price from a few
thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars apiece.
It is not easy for Americans to appreciate the importance of swords
in pre-20th-century Japan. Beginning in feudal times, Japanese
warlords equipped their armies with razor-sharp swords and fancy
sword fittings.
"During the Edo period, a time of peace, swords were worn as status
symbols," said Mr. Izzard, who was the head of the Japanese and
Korean art department at Christie's from 1980 to 1997. "Craft
schools specializing in sword fittings emerged, each with its own
traditions and styles."
Samurai wore their swords in public, a symbol of class and honor. A
samurai might choose quiet, subdued fittings to wear at a high
governmental occasion or something more flamboyant for a more casual
event, much as women wear their jewels today. In 1876 the emperor
Meiji banned the wearing of swords in public as part of his
modernization campaign.
"What were once wearable symbols of wealth, prestige or entitlement
became relics that illustrated 600 years of designs by some of the
world's finest metalworkers," Mr. Izzard said. "Collecting swords
and their fittings quickly became popular in Japan and the West. Mosl
é's tenure in Japan coincided with the wave of interest in Japanese
art among Westerners, who were intrigued by the recently opened
country and its culture."
Japonisme swept over Europe and America, influencing artists,
furniture and textile designers and metalworkers. Mr. Moslé was in
the right place at the right time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum all
have Japanese metalwork in their collections, some from the same
period.
Many of Mr. Izzard's sword fittings come in beautifully lacquered
boxes that may have been commissioned by Mr. Moslé; they are works
of art in themselves. Sword fittings are ardently collected by
connoisseurs of Japanese art, so it is worth seeing Mr. Moslé's
collection before it is dispersed.
Doyle New York will not have its Chinese porcelain auction until
Oct. 27, but from Monday through next Friday the auction house is
scheduling previews by appointment for 60 lots of Chinese blue and
white porcelain from the Kangxi period (1662-1722) from the Ralph
Spencer Collection. (Information: Andrea Blunck Frost, Doyle's Asian
art expert, 212-427-4141.)
Mr. Spencer assembled his collection in the 1960's and 70's on trips
to London and at prominent Manhattan galleries like Chait. He was a
contemporary, and collecting rival, of
F. Gordon Morrill, whose Chinese porcelain collection Doyle sold
last September for $12 million. (Morrill's rare Yuan dynasty pilgrim
flask, circa 1345, sold for $5.8 million, a world auction record for
a piece of Chinese porcelain.)
The Spencer Collection, which is later in date, is expected to earn
about $300,000.
Philadelphia Curator
Anne d'Harnoncourt, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
has announced the appointment of David L. Barquist as curator of
American decorative arts, beginning in January. Mr. Barquist has
been acting curator of American decorative arts at the Yale
University Art Gallery, where he began his career as an intern in
1981.
An authority on American silver, Mr. Barquist is the author of "Myer
Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York" and "American and
English Pewter at the Yale University Art Gallery."
"The Philadelphia collections are extraordinary, but the museum is
regionally focused," Mr. Barquist said in an interview. "In trying
to present the story of American decorative arts, there are a few
holes one would try to fill judiciously. We need a few carefully
chosen examples of works from places like Boston to play off of the
museum's collections."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/arts/design/17ANTI.html