Beyond Golden Clouds out the door

2011 is here and with it comes some goodbyes. For the past three months, museum visitors have been treated to the beauty and elegance of the painted screens (as well as more modern mixed media interpretations) featured in Beyond Golden Clouds: Five Centuries of Japanese Screens. However it’s time to move on into another year of exciting exhibitions, so this past week we carefully packed up these masterworks and sent them home to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Taking down a gallery is typically faster than installing the artworks initially, but still requires a great deal of coordination, patience, care, and reverence for these awesome works.

One of Jiro Okura's Mountain Lake screens is packed. Because of their great weight and the delicately affixed gold leaf surface, these screens present unique handling and transportation challenges.

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Masami Teraoka on Japanese Screens

Hear contemporary artist, Masami Teraoka, discuss how Japanese screens have inspired his work as he walks through the exhibition Beyond Golden Clouds: Five Centuries of Japanese Screens. Throughout his talk, Teraoka refers to his most recent work, The Last Supper/The Inversion of the Sacred, which was on view at the Catherine Clark Gallery in November. It’s incredible to think how traditional Japanese painting techniques could inspire works that are so seemingly disparate.

Installing Japanese Screens

The Beyond Golden Clouds: Five Centuries of Japanese Screens exhibition has arrived from halfway across the country — the St. Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Staff from each institution were required to accompany the shipments by riding on long-haul trucks for well over 40 hours. We are now installing the exhibition and the screens, and the galleries are really lovely. One of the most exciting pieces is contemporary, the From the Mountain Lake Screen Tachi Series by Okura Jiro; the screens in this series have gold foil pieces attached to them, and they leave some tiny pieces of gold foil in their wake. This is not normally what we like to see, but the artist created these screens with the intention of seeing them deteriorate over the years.

In a true collaboration, both lenders have portions of the screen and we have placed them together, and they are fantastic. The screens are a wonderful mixture of traditional and contemporary and I look forward to the public will be able to see them on Oct. 15.