REVELING IN THE EDO PERIOD: Etsuko and Joe Price
Southland Magazine, Spring/Summer 1999

"I have this obsession with natural light," says Joe Price. He's speaking of the gallery addition to his extraordinary Bart Prince house in Corona del Mar, a space newly designed to display works from his preeminent collection of Edo period Japanese scroll and screen paintings according to his own exacting standards. (He won't quarrel with the suggestion that his is the best collection in the world outside the Imperial Palace; and even then… he offers only a discreet smile.) Price is the man whose drive, dedication and devotion made possible the Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum, where he fought for every detail of design and lighting on behalf of "the client", his paintings; and who, with his Japanese-born wife, Etsuko, has promised the 1,000 piece collection to the museum-a gift of inestimable and lasting significance to the Southland's Asian cultural heritage.

Absorbing light from the Pacific Ocean, the gallery nestles beneath the main structure of the cliff-side residence, an architectural counterpoint to the ceremonial tearooms built for the Prices with impeccable craftsmanship by seventeenth generation palace carpenters from Japan. Also designed by Bart Prince, it contemporizes both the stylistic themes and the craftsmanship of the tearooms without the irreverence of imitation: the lovely hard-wood floor breaks off before the entrance in an irregular pattern of rounded edges, the molded concrete forms of a supporting column and the ceiling are formal in their studied stylization, the moveable soshi screens that admit the subdued glow of natural light are tilted at an angle which manages to be both unsettling and serene. Cutting across the space at an angle also is the low display platform for screens, which conceal an expansive storage area behind.

The main attraction, clearly, is the art itself. For these paintings of exceptional rarity and beauty, Price insisted on fidelity to the tradition of the tokanoma, a tearoom alcove in which scroll paintings are displayed one at a time. For the gallery, in a nod to Western exhibition conventions, two moveable alcove units were designed, so that two paintings and one screen could be shown at once without mutual distraction. In keeping with Japanese tradition, too, Price sees to it that each painting is displayed for no more than one day, returned to storage each evening, and replaced with a different work the following morning.

Price fell in love with the paintings when he first began to buy examples in this country in the early 1950s. "I didn't realize then that I was collecting art," he says with a chuckle, recalling how he was stunned, on a first visit to Japan, to find "art everywhere, lying around. And no one wanted it." He relies on his eye rather than his knowledge of art history. Never impressed by great names-although vastly more knowledgeable about them now than when he started-he was guided by the basic principle of his great mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Price worked for several years as an engineering consultant: "If it didn't make [its subject] more beautiful than nature," he says, "I wasn't interested." He is awed, too, by the incredible skill with which these paintings were made: no matter how complex the image, he says, "No two lines ever cross in a scroll painting. There's only one layer of paint, which makes them thin enough to roll." Still adding to the collection to this day, Price attributes the new availability of some important works to the current economic woes in Japan: he recently bought a fine Kimei painting of a Chinese general riding lion-dog in Tokyo, for example, and believes that this is the moment to acquire "great paintings by unknown artists."

Despite his passion for Japanese culture, Price speaks not a word of the language. His wife Etsuko, he explains, whom he met as a translator in 1963, is his "bridge to the Japanese community." A match for Price's effervescent energy, his wife describes herself as a "country girl" who was raised in the old traditions. In this country now since 1965, however, she has become an important mover in the sophisticated world of Japanese business and culture: a former board member of the Japanese American Cultural Community Center in Los Angeles, she has also been active in the cultural affairs of the Japan-America Society and, with her husband, successfully raised substantial support from Japan-based corporations that do business in Southern California, to follow their own lead in funding LACMA's Japanese Pavillion. Currently, the couple work together to insure that their paintings continue to be available to institutions in Japan, and that visiting scholars from throughout the world have the access they need to the collection. "My husband has completely changed Japanese art history," she says of Joe's continuing obsession, "not only in collecting the old, but in discovering new artists. Many people buy for investment," she adds: "my husband buys for love."