[ed. Saw this show yesterday and it is indeed a knockout. The accompanying book is here.]
I am passionate on a cellular level for the Chrysler Building in New York; I love you, I cannot resist you. Art deco is as alluring as a dapper villain. Deco has no enemies, no politics, no ethics, no manifestos, not even a united school of makers, all of which is why art history has never taken it seriously, and all of which makes it fascinating. Its streamlined, diamantine appearance is adaptable by all comers: rapacious capitalists, jazz players, proto-feminists. It gleams, glows, and glimmers. And now that examples of that naked, forceful exuberance created in Japan in the years leading up to war are paying their first visit to the victorious enemy country 70 years later, it's a major, marvelous, vaguely uneasy event. You will love it; you will not be able to resist it.
War is the backdrop, but Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945 is summering in leafy, bucolic Volunteer Park, where Seattle Asian Art Museum physically nestles Japanese deco in a sisterly embrace. SAAM's 1933 building is a deco gem, designed to provide pleasure in every respect, from the ornate aluminum grills on the doors to the air ducts and light fixtures outside the bathrooms, all veiny marble and shiny gilt in between. It is an American couple named Robert and Mary who brought together Deco Japan, which represents most of their collection of around two hundred paintings, sculptures, woodblock prints, home furnishings, graphic designs, and pieces of clothing. Robert Levenson is an anesthesiologist; anesthesia knocks you out while you're still breathing, too.
When Levenson began collecting this stuff, nobody wanted it. Levenson was told it didn't exist, but he persisted because he'd glimpsed catalogs from a 1930s exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art, of all places. With no clearinghouses to turn to, Levenson scouted out and went through four dozen dealers. Asking for interwar material once, he was actually chased out of a Kyoto antique shop. There is no pride in the militarism of a lost war, and anyway, of far greater value in Japan than deco are objects rooted to the heritage developed during Japan's 200 years of self-enforced seclusion, which gives Japan its ongoing distinctiveness. By comparison, deco is alien-smeared and brief. Even the director of the first venue where Deco Japan appeared, New York's Japan Society in 2012, said that until Deco Japan, he'd assumed Japanese art had basically gone dark between 1910 and the anime pop of the 1990s.
