The Lords Of the Brush

The Price Tower in Bartlesville, a thing of copper cladding and cantilevered floors, was completed in 1956. The process wasn't easy. The architect and the oilman were frequently at loggerheads. Young Price was their go-between. "They'd roar at me," he remembers, "but once they were in the same room, both tigers became pussycats."

Price, incidentally, knows quite a lot about tigers. His show is full of them. Those symbols of the warrior's way glare out of his paintings, but despite their fangs and growls, they also tend to look a little bit like pussycats. Living tigers were unknown to Edo painters. None had reached the islands. The Japanese had seen only their skins.

Anyway, young Price and old Wright have just explored the site of the Guggenheim Museum, and now they're on a stroll. They stop in an art gallery. Wright looks, as he often does, at Japanese woodblock prints. His companion is attracted by something else entirely. Displayed on the wall is a monochrome hanging scroll.

"Grapevines" is an early work by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800). Price has never heard of him. But he notes that the picture's leaves have been painted without outlines, only with wet washes, in the so-called "boneless" manner, and that none of the tall painting's tightly twisting tendrils and interwoven vines have been allowed to cross. So he buys it.

"Grapevines" was Price's first Jakuchu. In time, that Edo artist would become his favorite painter, and he'd acquire many more. Some 20 of his Jakuchus -- powerful and curious images of tigers, elephants, cranes, plum blossoms, eagles and waving reeds in snow -- have been selected for the show.

For a while his art was called the Shin'enKan Collection after Jakuchu's studio ("The House of the Tranquil Heart"), though later he'd rename it the Etsuko and Joe Price Collection, in honor of his wife.

In Japan, Joe Price is known as "the American who rediscovered Jakuchu." Strangers bow to him in the street.

From the start, the man was hooked. During the next half-century, the Prices would acquire about 900 more Edo paintings.

One hundred and nine of them will be displayed at the Sackler, but not all at once. To protect them from the light, and to give them space to breathe, the paintings will be rotated during the exhibit's five-month run.

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"Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes" opens with midwinter. The light, already dim, is slowly growing dimmer. Two six-panel folding screens, both scenes of snowy night, shine on the broad wall.

In the painting on the left, a pair of magpies cackle round a plum tree. A rabbit climbs a pine in the picture on the right. Katsu Jagyoku (1735-1780) painted these dreamy images in 1774. Countless floating snowflakes fill his painted air.