Of Ceramics and Samurais, an interview with Joan B. Mirviss
By Cappi Williamson
For Joan Mirviss, proprietor of the eponymous gallery and one of the foremost dealers of Japanese ceramics in the U.S., November 10, 2010 is a big day. On that day, she will mount the first of a trio of exhibitions ten years in the making. “Kondô Yutaka: The Transformation of a Traditional Kyoto Family,” tells the story, through ceramics, of a Japanese family’s journey across generations from samurai warriors to master ceramicists. The second exhibition, at the Winter Antiques Show from January 21-30 will include over thirty works from contemporary clay masters, exhibited for the first time at the Armory. And the grand finale, “Birds of Dawn: Pioneers of the Sôdeisha Movement,” opens during Asia Week on March 16, 2011. Joan talks to The Curated Object about the tide change in Americans’ view of ceramics, the road that lead her to Asian art, and the remarkable stories behind the best artists working in clay today.
You say that this exhibition has been in the making for ten years – let’s go back even further than that. How did you first encounter ceramics?
I’ve never been a collector; I’ve been a dealer. I went to graduate school in Japanese art history at Columbia and, prior to that, I took a trip while an undergraduate to Japan that took me down the entire archipelago to study ceramics. I spent three months in Japan studying clay art, but when I got to graduate school, clay art was not considered lofty enough in academia, so I switched tracks and studied Japanese painting and what’s called the fine arts, but I never lost my passion for the clay. So after I getting my master’s from Columbia, I decided to become a dealer, and I was selling paintings and wood block prints, but on my trips to Japan, I was buying ceramic pieces for myself. I was a private dealer at the time, and didn’t have a gallery, but did exhibitions all over the country, but when clients would come to visit me at my home, they would see the ceramics and ask if they were for sale. I would tell that that, no, that was my private collection and not for sale.
Then, in 1983, there was, what was for me, a very seminal show of Japanese ceramics at the Smithsonian in Washington, that then travelled to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. I was completely smitten with the caliber and quality of the ceramics and I went back to see that show three times. I decided that the next time I went to Japan, I wanted to meet the woman responsible for the show, who had a small gallery in Tokyo, and was really the patroness of many of these artists. So, I did meet with her, and then through another friend, met my very first artist, who I’ve been friendly with since that time, whose name is Kawase Shinobu, he’s literally called the king of celadons in Japan. And that was really the moment when I started looking at contemporary clay as a viable business. And now we are speaking 26 years later – it’s taken a very long time since those very early roots, when I was happy to sell ten or fifteen pieces in a year – to now, when I sell that much in a three-day period. At that point, there were six museums in America that were casually or seriously starting to build collections in this field, and now there are over thirty just in this country, collecting in this area. And it’s taken 26 years of hard work to get to this point.
Talk about the change in American attitudes toward ceramics. How have things changed since those early days when clay wasn’t considered fine art?
I think things in general – the aesthetic appreciation – in this country for clay as an art form, has become more enlightened. An interesting bellwether is the change in appellation of the museum that was formerly known as the Museum of Arts & Crafts to the Museum of Art & Design. There has been a swing of the pendulum from looking at material in media that had traditionally been thought of as crafts that can now be thought of as art. I think it’s a general, international trend.
When did the idea first come about for this triumvirate of shows?
Well, there are three separate stories. The longest is the Sôdeisha show, my last show. I have been a fan of the Sôdeisha ceramics movement since 1984, at which point two of the artists from the show were still alive, and one had passed away. I met both of the living men before they died, and, in one case, was able to buy directly from the family after he died. I’ve always been passionate about Sôdeisha. But since that work is nominally non-functional, and very respected in Japan, it was at a much higher price point.
I’ll tell you a very cool story about one of the artists, Suzuki Osamu, one of the founders. I went to visit him in 1988, and I was offered four pieces. I was with my husband, who usually doesn’t travel with me, but happened to be on this trip. He didn’t speak any Japanese at that time. I was sitting there with my go-between person and the artists, looking at the pieces, and the prices at the time with the exchange rate were in the eight- to ten-thousand-dollar per piece range. There was no way at all that I could bring that material to the American market and anyone would get it. I loved it but there was no room. And this person was very famous and respected, so I just started apologizing. My husband looked at me and said, “What’s wrong?” And I told him the prices were too high. He looked at one and said, “Well, how much is that one?” I told him it was eight thousand. He said, “Well, that’s fabulous! I’ll buy it.” So, the first one I was able to buy, my husband actually bought. I brought it home.
So, jump forward a few years, and once I started selling the Japanese ceramics I could no longer have a collection, as those pieces were being sold. So, in order to have something we could collect, we started collecting European ceramic pieces. In my home, there are two large bays with shelves. The left-hand bay held the European collection, which was not for sale, and the right-hand held the Japanese pieces, which were for sale. But at that point in time, business was starting to go well, and I didn’t have enough Japanese to flesh the collection out, so I just grabbed the Suzuki piece and put it where the Japanese ceramics were. And one day, a very big dealer in Japanese antiques was coming to look at my paintings and he asked to bring three friends, who were bankers and his clients, to look at some of my pieces. I said, “Sure, bring your friends.” So three men arrived, all very well heeled and wealthy. One banker walks up and points to some of my Lucy Ried European ceramics, and asks if they’re for sale. Of course, the whole conversation was in Japanese, and I had to go through a very arduous conversation about why those are not for sale, but I tell him that the Japanese pieces are for sale. So, of course, he goes immediately for the Suzuki and I couldn’t — just couldn’t — lose face, so I said, “Yes, it’s for sale.” I thought I would make it such an expensive price that he will obviously say no. So I made it a ridiculously high price, and he said, “okay, I’ll take it,” opened his briefcase and pulled out all this cash. So, now what am I going to tell my husband? Since the piece is usually stored, I didn’t have to tell him anything right away. A year goes by, and we’re looking at some great European pieces, and he says that he really wishes he could buy something, but we don’t have the money. And I surprised him by saying, “Oh, yes we do!” So the next time I went to Japan, I bought a very small, desk-sized Suzuki piece that he could keep on his desk. That’s my Suzuki story.
The first piece I bought of his ended up going back to Japan, and it’s taken the West a long time to wake up to this and be willing to spend upwards of $100,000 for a piece.
How did the idea for an exhibition come out of those early experiences, and why did it take a decade to curate?
There is a large body of work by these three founders (Yagi Kazuô, Suzuki Osamu, and Yamada Hikaru) much of which came through me. When this customer, who bought the Suzuki, and my other customers, were buying really the best of the best in the late ‘90’s, it became clear to me that there was a significant interest level, so that I could now start to put material away and plan a major show and book. And the important thing to me is the book, which will focus on the Sôdeisha exhibition, because there is a very small library in English. They needed their day in the sun and I needed scholars to write about these important artists. So to be able to get this amount of material together it took over ten years; it was a big investment on my part. I’ve started offering pieces recently and I have two major museums desperate to get materials, so they get, sort of, first sell.
The first show (“Kondô Yutaka: The Transformation of a Traditional Kyoto Family”) was about three years of planning. It came about because I have represented Kondô Takahiro and have done four shows of his work over the last twelve years, and I have been placing his works in museums all over the country. About 7-8 years ago, I found this piece in Japan, a major work by Takahiro’s uncle. This is an unknown piece. There’s a famous other pair of the feet of the Buddha that’s published all the time, but the family didn’t even know of this piece’s existence. I found it in a collection in Tokyo. So the widow of this artist, Kondô Yûtaka, who committed suicide and died in 1983, was still alive and asked if I would do something for her husband. So the family got together and pulled fourteen pieces that had never been previously put on the market and asked me to do a show. Because this man committed suicide, and there’s a strong negative association in Japan, his name is spoken in whispers.
His important contribution to the whole 21st-century of ceramic artists – many of my artists were his pupils – it needs to be noted. But when I agreed to do that, I didn’t know a lot about the family, besides the youngest grandson, Takahiro. I said, “wouldn’t it be more interesting for the American public to put your uncle’s work in a context? So we’d have work by you, the nephew, and work by your grandfather as well, who was the first artist designated as a national living treasure for porcelain Blumen whiteware?” So they again raided the family warehouse and found me some pieces. Now I had grandpa’s work, and then grandpa had two sons – the son who committed suicide and then the father of Takahiro, who is the second son – so I had three generations, all four people.
Then, I learned that the family was originally a samurai class family. The domain that they were attached to was a temple – they were the defenders of the Kiyomizu temple. And that temple happens to be situated at the top of a hill, and on the slope of the hill, is one of the ceramic centers of Kyoto, where traditional Kyoto ceramics are made. Great-grandpa, in the 1850’s, who was still a practicing samurai, was in the position of saving the life of a very important historical figure. The man whose life the Kondô family ancestors saved, later was instrumental in bringing the Emperor back in power. Unfortunately, he was captured by the government, imprisoned, and tortured for 22 days, and legend holds that he was about to give up and felt he might actually reveal the whereabouts of this person, so he managed to kill himself in captivity by ramming his head against a stone wall, dislocating his tongue, and swallowing it.
The Kondô family was disgraced, but when the Emperor was reinstalled, he gave the family, as a permanent gift, land by Kiyomizu temple where they could have a teahouse. And the family still owns this teahouse and runs it, and so when Yûzô was born in 1902, it was a period of time where the samurai had nothing to do. So what were the educated with some wealth to do? Most of them became professionals, but in the case of Yûzô, his father suggested that he become a potter, because that’s where they lived – near to other potters. So that’s what Yûzô did. And he became very famous. Then he had his two sons – he had the one son, the younger son Hiroshi, who followed in his footsteps and did many of the same motifs – same glazes, etc. But the older son, who really wanted to go to Kyoto University and study philosophy, but his father said no, because he was the firstborn son and he had to stay in the family business. So, he went to ceramics school and was so brilliant that they made him part of the faculty immediately upon graduation.
But Kyoto is a very small world – it’s a little like Boston, in that there are old families, and people can trace their families back and back and back. And it’s very small, and, in my mind, very claustrophobic, very rigid, and very stratified. So, there’s not a lot of freedom. So one of the first things Yutaka did was leave. And how could he leave? Well, you get a teaching position abroad. So, he spent a year traveling, mostly based at Indiana University in Bloomington. And there, because there’s a number of great museums in the area, he was exposed to a lot of different types of clay art from all over the world. And he changed from being a porcelain artist, doing blue and white like daddy and his brother, to doing this stoneware punch’ong style, which is a Korean type of slip glaze inlay, and bringing it in totally new directions, and being very modernist in his approach. Just black and white, very simple forms, very elegant forms.
Kondo Yuzo, Vase with cobalt blue painting of a pomegranate on gold ground, ca. 1978, Glazed Porcelain, 8 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches, Inv# 6706, Photo courtesy of Joan B. Mirviss LTD, New York, Photography by Kenzi Yamazaki
This is the grandfather, Kondô Yûzô. These are little, tiny bamboo shoots. He’s brought a very modernist approach to a subject matter that’s never portrayed like this – it’s almost abstracted. There are very strong sense of line and dynamism – you can almost feel him brushing this on.
KONDO YUTAKA, Black-white vases, 1973, Glazed stoneware, left to right, 15 3/4 x 7 1/8 inches, 13 x 9 1/2 inches, 14 3/8 x 4 3/4 inches, Photo courtesy of Joan B. Mirviss LTD, New York, Photography by Richard Goodbody
This is from Kondô Yutaka, the namesake of the exhibition. We call this PUNCHAIMISHIO WEAR in Japanese, and what the artist has done is apply a layer of white slip, which is liquid clay, that, when it’s thin enough, acts like a glaze. Then he applies a layer of black glaze on top of that, and while the clay is still not perfectly dry, he takes a roulette and runs that in all different ways and directions so you’re perforating the black glaze and seeing the white glaze underneath, or the clay. He has glazed the interior because in Japan, the piece needs to hold water. So, he’s looking back at ancient forms, but giving it a new, startlingly modern, countenance.
Kondô Takahiro, Bluish green “W”-shaped form with white glass cover, 2010, Porcelain with bluish green glaze and glass cover, 10 1/4 x 10 5/8 x 6 3/4 inches , Inv# 6723, Photo courtesy of Joan B. Mirviss LTD, New York, Photography by Kenzi Yamazaki
When you get to grandson, Takahiro, he’s not working on the wheel. In 1983, when he was an international champion ping-pong player, he was surrounded by ceramics, but what his father did didn’t interest him. However, he was always very close to his uncle, and when his uncle committed suicide, he decided to rethink his life and go back to clay. And, for this show, he’s made a body of work where he’s reflecting on his family’s heritage. In the black work, he’s thinking about his uncle. This is brand new, he’s never done this kind of work before.
So, his family’s all wheel-throwing, but he’s come back, and now he’s kind of a heretic, because he’s working in slab forms, although they are in porcelain. And he always considered them objets. This early series contained small, beautiful, jewel-like boxes, that would have blue enamel-wear inside. And this is his patented glaze, which is an amalgamation of platinum, but with gold, silver, and glass. The glass allows the glass to adhere to the porcelain in the firing. But the formula, when he brushes it on, he controls the size of the globules. And he can change the color depending on the addition of gold. There’s no one anywhere in the world who does anything like his work.
Is there a different in the way that your Western vs. Japanese clients use these pieces? Does anyone actually put flowers in them?
Japanese do, but the Western people don’t. They’re more objets for them. Many Japanese use them for flowers. Often they put in a plastic liner, because you don’t really actually want to pour the water out in a sink, etc., to preserve the purity of the piece.
For more information please visit: Joan B Mirviss Ltd
Seed Newsvine
