Joe Price purchased his first Japanese painting in the 1950s, under the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright. Over the next five decades, he and his wife Etsuko would collect more than 200 masterpieces from the Edo period (1615-1868), a time when Japan had isolated itself from the rest of the world. Curiously, during that period of national seclusion, independent and diversely creative artists flourished as never before. Today, the Etsuko and Joe Price Collection is placed among the finest in the world. The detailed patterns evident in many of the works reflect the high regard artists of the period held for textile designers. The expressiveness in the eyes of the various animals, demons, deities, and people depicted suggest that they all inhabited the same world rather than different spiritual levels- the prominent religious theory of the time.The animal world becomes more animated, landscapes have their own light, spirits are alive, past becomes present, evoking a mood that suggests familiarity with all worlds, above and below. At the collection's core are screens, hanging scrolls, fans, and some of the finest examples of the distinctive, hauntingly preternatural renderings of animal life by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800), one of the most innovative and imaginative of Kyoto's eighteenth-century painters. Jakuchu's prominence in recent decades has been greatly aided by the Price's intensive interest in his work.

This is an insightful and intelligent re-thinking of Japanese art history & its Western influences. This broad-ranging and profoundly influential analysis describes how Western art institutions and vocabulary were transplanted to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870-80s, artists and government administrators in Japan encountered the Western 'system of the arts' for the first time. Under pressure to exhibit and sell its artistic products abroad, Japan's new Meiji government came face-to-face with the need to create European-style art schools and museums - and even to establish Japanese words for art, painting, artist, and sculpture. "Modern Japanese Art" is a full re-conceptualization of the field of Japanese art history, exposing the politics through which the words, categories, and values that structure our understanding of the field came to be while revealing the historicity of Western and non-Western art history.