This lot is offered without reserve.

Extraordinary Persons: The Kimiko and John Powers Collection John G. Powers (1916--1999) and his wife, Kimiko, began acquiring Japanese art in 1960, stimulated by their interest in contemporary American Pop Art. John Powers, who began his career as general counsel for Prentice Hall Publishing in New York, retired as its president in the late 1950s. During his time in the publishing world, he and his wife developed a passion for Pop Art and formed a major collection. The Powers Art Center, a memorial to the life of John Powers, opened in 2014 in Carbondale, Colorado, where the couple made their home from the 1970s. The Center showcases Jasper John’s limited edition works on paper. By 1970, when their Japanese masterworks, including calligraphy (see lots 19 and 35), were first exhibited at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, the Powers had formed one of the most outstanding private collections outside Japan. They had traveled to Japan together and formed friendships with the major Tokyo art dealers, including Setsu Isao and Yabumoto Soshiro. The couple made their collection available to the faculty and students at Harvard, resulting in a 1988 exhibition of one hundred examples of Edo-period art, including much material purchased after 1971. In 1999, just months before the death of John Powers, John Rosenfield published Extraordinary Persons: Works by Eccentric, Nonconformist Japanese Artists of the Early Modern Era (1580–1868) in the Collection of Kimiko and John Powers. This definitive, three-volume catalogue of painting and calligraphy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was a labor of love that took almost three decades to complete. One of John Powers’s favorite quotes comes from the poet Bradford Shank’s Fragments: "Nothing in the world is yours to keep. You may have but not hold. In the end, you receive only that which you have given.”

Style of Kobori Enshu (1579-1647)

Miwayama, circa 1620-50

Details

Style of Kobori Enshu (1579-1647)
Miwayama, circa 1620-50
Poem card mounted as hanging scroll; ink on paper
8¼ x 7 3/8in. (21 x 18.8cm.)

Literature

John M. Rosenfield with Fumiko E. Cranston, Extraordinary Persons: Works by Eccentric, Nonconformist Japanese Artists of the Early Modern Era (1580-1868) in the Collection of Kimiko and John Powers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1999), pp. 196-97, no. 40.
John Rosenfield and Shujiro Shimada, Traditions of Japanese Art: Selections from the Kimiko and John Powers Collection (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1970), no. 99.

Exhibited

The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, 1970

Special notice

This lot is offered without reserve.

Lot Essay

The poem has been translated as follows:

Mt. Miwa
On this very day,
Who shall hear the cry
Of the cuckoo flying
East of Miwa?

Translation by Fumiko E. Cranston from Extraordinary Persons, Vol. 1 (1999), p. 197.

More from An Inquiring Mind: American Collecting of Japanese and Korean Art

View All