Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture 15790 10th Ave Hanford Ca 93230
| Entrance to the Clark Heart Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Clark Centre |
It saturday in the heart of the flattest, hottest part of California'southward Central Valley, surrounded past endless rows of almond copse. One is tempted to say "in the heart of nowhere" but that would be an insult to the good citizens of Hanford, the nearest town. This is, after all, where one native son, Willard Clark, single-handedly clustered one of the largest privately owned collections of Japanese art anywhere outside Nihon -- and congenital a museum to house it. An astonishing labor of love and practiced taste, the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Civilisation was open to the public for twenty years, from 1995 until this past June 30 when it closed for good.
Happily for Japanese-art aficionados in the U.Southward., the museum's holdings are safely in the easily of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Along with the entire collection, which has an estimated value of $25 million, the MIA acquired the Center's curator, Andreas Marks, who now oversees the institute's Japanese and Korean art. Although it's most of the style across the country, the MIA was willing to look subsequently the Clark Collection and keep information technology intact when museums in California failed to show interest. Fortunately for Cardinal Valley residents, the Clark Center's every bit impressive bonsai garden has establish a home closer past, at the Shinzen Friendship Garden in nearby Fresno.
| Interior of the Clark Center Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Clark Center |
Though I was living in the Bay Surface area, only three hours away by interstate, when the Clark Center opened, I had simply vaguely heard about the place and wasn't prompted to visit information technology until nigh two years agone, when Bill Clark wrote to say that he read and enjoyed Artscape Nihon. I made a mental note to check out his museum on one of my trips domicile, then promptly forgot about it until I learned that the Middle would be closing this summer. Luckily I was planning to visit the Bay Surface area in June, then with a slight itinerary aligning my married woman and I were able to drive downstate to Hanford three days before the Middle'due south closure.
Six miles s of Hanford, a pocket-size sign indicated where to turn off a state route onto a gravel drive with almond orchards on both sides. After about a one-half-mile, the driveway abruptly ended at a parking lot next to what appeared, incongruously, to be a Japanese temple wall of tan stucco framed by sturdy wooden crossbars. A rustic shake-roofed gate led within the compound, where nosotros constitute a large one-story stucco edifice, likewise in Japanese style, surrounded by grounds landscaped with pines, rocks, and stone lanterns. Coming upon this scene on a hot summer afternoon in the midst of a Central Valley farmscape was, in a word, disorienting.
| Function of the karesansui-fashion rock garden surrounding the Clark Center Gallery. Photo by Alan Gleason |
Entering the exhibit hall, we passed through a foyer with a selection of works from varying eras into the main gallery. This was a spacious, loftier-ceilinged room ringed with a stunning multifariousness of works. The exhibition was zero if not eclectic. Equally the 1,700-slice collection had already been moved to Minnesota, this, the Centre's valedictory bear witness, represented the temporary render of a few select highlights -- only a couple of dozen in all. If that gave the show a somewhat scattershot attribute, it also whetted one'southward appetite for more. Nosotros plant ourselves wishing we could fly to Minneapolis correct and so and at that place.
Clark has described himself equally an "unrestrained, undisciplined, crazy collector." And so it is no surprise that his acquisitions run the gamut of genres -- scrolls, screens, sculptures, ceramics, kimono -- from the eighth century to the nowadays. But thanks to his own judicious eye, too of those of the experts he eagerly sought out, there is no dross in the gold here. Of item note are the collection's Kamakura-menses Buddhist sculptures, its Edo-menstruation paintings, and some fine folding screens, 1 pair of which, a 12-console tour-de-force by the 19th-century artist Shibata Zeshin entitled The Four Elegant Pastimes, formed the centerpiece of the concluding Hanford exhibition.
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| Scrolls and screens on brandish in the Clark Center Gallery ' s terminal exhibition, Elegant Pastimes: Masterpieces of Japanese Art from the Clark Collections at the Minneapolis Establish of Arts. Photos past Kaoru Moriyama |
Judging from the overall selection, information technology seems that the collector'southward real soft spot is for Edo-era and later ringlet paintings, specially landscapes in sumi ink. There were some gems on display past the likes of Kano Sansetsu (early 17th century), Ito Jakuchu (late 18th century), Yokoi Kinoku, Yamamoto Baiitsu, and Kikuchi Yosai (early, mid-, and tardily 19th century respectively), and Fukuda Kodojin (early on 20th century). Another standout was a pale-blue porcelain urn by Sueharu Fukami, a contemporary ceramist whose works are a favorite of Clark; he has purchased about 80 of them.
How did all of these works wind up in central California? Even the collector himself has a hard time explaining this. In an interview published on the Heart website here, Clark recalls beingness absorbed by a photo of a Japanese garden in his 6th-class geography book. Much later, while serving in the U.Due south. Navy, his squadron was frequently deployed to Nihon, where, he says, "the beauty of everything astounded me." Later still, in the mid-1950s, he and his married woman traveled in Nippon for several weeks and bought their offset Japanese fine art. From then on the gear up was in. Returning to alive and work on the family dairy subcontract in Hanford, Clark somewhen designed and built a Japanese-inspired house and swimming. A fortuitous meeting with Kodo Matsubara, a Japanese landscape architect who was designing gardens in California, led to a lifelong collaboration during which Matsubara lent his skills and tastes to the construction and expansion of the Clark Center.
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Landscaping around the Clark Center Gallery edifice. Photo past Alan Gleason
By the late 1970s Clark was forming connections with dealers in Japanese art in New York and elsewhere, and making increasingly frequent purchases of paintings and sculpture of various eras. Pecker and his wife Libby launched the nonprofit Clark Foundation for the Study of Art in 1995 and moved their collection into a newly completed gallery. Eventually renamed the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture, the facilities that just airtight are the culmination of a gradual expansion of what began as an actress wing on the family unit home. One of only two U.S. museums devoted exclusively to Japanese art, at its peak the Center was holding iv exhibitions and drawing 5,000 visitors annually; today information technology sits empty among the almond groves. The Clarks have non commented on what will happen to the buildings and grounds, which they still own.
Sadly, Bill Clark was not well plenty to be at the Center during its last days of functioning. 1 wishes that his accomplishments were amend known in the homeland of the masterpieces he so admired. Notwithstanding, he is not without recognition in Japan. Clark is i of very few Americans to have received two Orders of the Ascension Sun from the Japanese government -- one for innovations in cattle farming that improved the Japanese dairy industry, and one for his promotion of the study of Japanese fine art and civilization. Permit united states of america hope his legacy can be preserved in the Cardinal Valley too.
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View through the gate of the Clark Center to the almond orchards stretching across. Photo by Kaoru Moriyama All images by permission of the Clark Middle for Japanese Art & Civilisation.
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| Hanford, California (The Clark Centre closed permanently on June 30, 2015.) |
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Source: https://artscape.jp/artscape/eng/ht/1508.html
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