Art: A world within worlds

Few people have the opportunity to build one museum-quality art collection, let alone several. But that is the happy fortune of John Weber, whose collection of Japanese art opens Sunday at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

"Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection," which debuted in Berlin and was recently presented at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, reveals the eclectic and ever-expanding interests of a man for whom collecting has been a passion since childhood.

As a kid growing up outside New York City, Weber collected baseball cards. As a young man, he became obsessed with Rembrandt etchings. Later, while teaching at Cornell University's medical school, he found time to fill his New York apartment with Elizabethan furniture and to outfit his office with modernist chairs. Along the way, Weber and his wife also bought a collection of ancient Chinese art that is now at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. After divorcing about 12 years ago, he turned his attention to Japanese art and culture, relying in part on advice from Julia Meech, a Minneapolis native and Harvard-educated scholar who now curates his collection.

"To some degree, you have to be opportunistic and take advantage of things when they're available," Weber, 69, said recently by phone from New York. "For instance, I have a small collection of Negoro lacquer, a special type of black-and-red lacquer that is named after a temple there. It is from a well known collection of about 100 pieces owned by a man who died in Japan. I happened to be in Tokyo when it became available, and I was fortunate to be able to buy what I felt was the cream of the collection."

Several pieces of the lacquer are featured in the show, along with a selection of rustic ceramics, paintings and calligraphy affixed to hanging scrolls, luxurious kimonos, elaborately painted folding screens and a small selection of bronzes. The collection spans about 1,200 years, fills eight spacious galleries, and includes a room of items inspired by "The Tale of Genji," one of Japan's most famous literary works.

A novelistic account of court life written in 1021 by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the Genji tales have inspired centuries of theater performances, dance productions and ornately painted folding screens. One of the liveliest screens in Weber's collection is a six-panel depiction of a confrontation between Genji's wife and one of his mistresses at a festival. Servants pulling the women's two-wheeled carriages tussle for position on a parade route as horses rear and bystanders titter and gape, aghast at the unseemly display. As in most 17th-century Japanese painting, the events are depicted from a bird's-eye view that encompasses dozens of characters darting among tall pine trees. A background flickering with gold leaf further enhances the drama.

Art spans 12 centuries

Two pear-shaped bottles from about 1650 illustrate differences in Chinese and Japanese style, said Matthew Welch, the museum's curator of Japanese art. In the more typically Chinese vase, Daoist sages and symbols are depicted in ovals and roundels surrounded by painted basketweave patterns. On the second vase, an overall design of peony leaves and blossoms is more characteristically Japanese, Welch said.

Nature motifs are well represented, notably in folding screens and kimono ornamentation. Two screens filled with 37 cranes prancing against gold-leaf backgrounds illustrate a fresh naturalism in the 1760s and '70s. By the early 20th century, that naturalism evolved into a dramatic ink painting of a life-sized black bull and two proud white chickens.

Weber's textile collection is also remarkable for its variety and novelty. Garments range from a luscious 18th-century kimono of persimmon silk decorated with white wisteria blossoms, gold and purple fans, to a 20th-century quilted fireman's jacket and a charming child's kimono from the 1950s woven with Mickey Mouse designs.

Curators Welch and Meech have wisely arranged the objects and paintings to inform each other. In the first gallery, for example, an unusually well-preserved 14th-century lacquered rice tub sits next to a scroll fragment depicting similar implements in use at a banquet. Elsewhere, paintings of kimono-clad courtesans and samurai complement the many garments on display.

Nevertheless, many elements of the Weber collection are likely to mystify viewers who, like me, don't read calligraphy and are unfamiliar with the lives and significance of the show's innumerable Chinese and Japanese gods, warriors, monks and demons. The exhibit's historical sweep and profusion of materials add to the impression of a collection grounded more in enthusiasm than disciplined study.

"When people don't respect other cultures, you end up with intolerance and terrorism," he said. "I would like people to come away with a sense that other cultures are to be respected, and to accept the beliefs of individuals in those cultures, even though they might be significantly different from our belief structures and ways of doing things."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431