Timeless Elegance in Japanese Art: Celebrating 40 Years!: Asia Week New York

In March, Joan B. Mirviss LTD will celebrate its 40th anniversary! To mark the occasion, the gallery presents the important exhibition, “Timeless Elegance in Japanese Art: A Celebration of Forty Years” accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.

This celebratory show includes forty plus works of art carefully chosen over several years in anticipation of this milestone. Twenty of these works, by living artists working in clay and long represented by the gallery, were created or specifically selected by each artist for this event. The balance of this exhibition consists of major, innovative paintings and famous ukiyo-e prints by important eighteenth and nineteenth-century artists, together with masterworks by eminent ceramists of the twentieth century. Highlights include major vessels by pioneers in the art of clay, such as Kitaôji Rosanjin, Yagi Kazuo, Okabe Mineo and Kamoda Shôji, as well as works by contemporary stars, including Akiyama Yô, Fujikasa Satoko, Kawase Shinobu, Ogawa Machiko, and Suzuki Osamu. The chef d’oeuvre among the paintings is a strikingly modern set of six-fold screens, dated 1903, by the Kyoto painter Hashimoto Gahô, which dramatically depict a rising moon with young bamboo paired with a setting sun with a pine tree, both in ink juxtaposed against a radiant gold ground. Noteworthy early impressions in superb condition of celebrated ukiyo-e woodblock prints by the world-renowned masters, Harunobu, Hokusai and Hiroshige complement this collection and are partnered with new discoveries by the well known painters Yamamoto Baiitsu, Nakamura Hôchû, Takeuchi Seihô and Shibata Zeshin.

Co-founder of Asia Week New York, previously an annual exhibitor at International Asian Art Fair, and a regular at the Winter Antiques Show (this year marks her 36th year), Joan Mirviss has been a leading dealer in Japanese art in America and the leading force to bring modern and contemporary Japanese ceramics to the forefront of collecting in the West.

In 1977, Mirviss officially incorporated her business, Joan B Mirviss ltd, soon after completing graduate studies in Japanese art history at Columbia University. As a private dealer, she spent decades on the road exhibiting at art and antiques shows from coast to coast, which enabled her to meet and work with both established and new collectors as well as museum curators. Furthermore, three years spent living in Japan enabled her to forge lasting relationships with clay artists throughout the country.

Many of the collections that she helped to build are now included in the permanent holdings in museums such as: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Arthur M. Sackler Museum and Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; etc.

Her clients include the most important private collectors and museums of Japanese art across the globe. She has authored and/or collaborated on major publications, exhibitions and scholarly articles on a wide range of Japanese art subjects, often with the institutions mentioned above. After participating as a private dealer in more than one hundred antiques and art fairs, Mirviss opened her current, elegant gallery at 78th Street and Madison Avenue in NY, where the exhibition will run from 03.09.17-04.14.17.