Awards
2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Yasufumi Nakamori, Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro
Yasufumi Nakamori, Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010)
Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010) revisits the Herbert Bayer–designed publication Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), which featured Ishimoto Yasuhiro’s photographs of an elegant imperial villa in Kyoto, a seventeenth-century structure that interestingly foreshadows certain western modernist design paradigms. While this errand may sound obscurantist to some, the author and curator Yasufumi Nakamori has a profoundly fascinating story to tell. It emerges that the architect Tange Kenzō—with Walter Gropius, an author of the 1960 book—extensively altered the fledgling photographer’s vision, drastically cropping his photographs, for instance, so as to better align them with Bauhaus aesthetics, and to reinforce his own position in postwar Japanese debates on the relation of the modern to tradition.
In this astute, impeccably produced catalogue, Nakamori importantly rehabilitates Ishimoto’s initial vision of Katsura, reproducing his original, perfectly stunning photographs alongside the altered images, which remain compelling in their own ways. At the same time, Nakamori contrives to tell an array of riveting tales: about intercultural relations between postwar Japan and the United States; about a serendipitous meeting between seventeenth-century Japanese and Bauhaus sensibilities; and about the stakes inhering in the relation between architects and photographers. A case study in how to effectively turn a dissertation into an exhibition catalogue, Katsura is altogether a project of impressive reach and complexity, executed with subtlety and intellectual integrity.
Jury: Anna Chave, Graduate Center, City University of New York, chair; Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Virginia Fields, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Erica Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty Museum.
2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Read about Darielle Mason’s Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the winner of the 2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.
