OUR ART: A gift from East to West
“Portrait of Poet Kenji Miyazawa,” color woodcut on paper, edition 9/50, 1956. Gift of Blanchette Rockefeller to Clay Center, 1969. Click to enlarge.
Jun’Ichiro Sekino was a self-taught artist known for distinctive figurative prints and kabuki scenes. He admired the work of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Rembrandt van Rijn, and was heavily influenced by the work of Albrecht Dürer, a supreme master of both etching and drawing 500 years ago. Sekino said of Dürer, “One of the things I like most about him is his thoroughness, his corner-to-corner completeness.”
In the color woodcut print, “Portrait of Poet Kenji Miyazawa,” Sekino depicted the subject in a pose often seen in European portraiture and incorporated poetry into the background in the Japanese tradition. To achieve subtle shading and colors, Sekino made shallow, beveled chisel cuts in the wood block. His use of subdued color hints at the sensitivity of his subject, a teacher and writer who stood against social inequality that existed between the wealthy and the poor. “I’ve always been fond of this piece,” said Denise Deegan, associate curator at the Clay Center Museum. “There’s a peacefulness about it. The tonal quality is amazing.”
When the Charleston Art Gallery opened in Sunrise Mansion in 1969, Blanchette Rockefeller and her husband, John D. Rockefeller III, joined their son Jay and his wife, Sharon, at the opening. At the time, the future two-term West Virginia governor and now fourth-term U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller was a state resident in his early 30s. In June 1969, Blanchette Rockefeller wrote to the gallery’s governing board, offering a no-strings-attached gift that she wanted to go to a museum that would make good use of them. She ultimately gave 19 works, 11 of them Japanese. In time, Charleston Art Gallery became part of Sunrise Museum, which changed into Avampato Discovery Museum, now merged into the Clay Center.
— By Bob Schwarz
“Our Art” is an occasional series that runs in the Sunday Gazette-Mail. This article was reprinted from the May 13, 2007 edition
