Collecting Japanese Art with John Powers

Kimiko Powers

John Powers became interested in Japanese art purely by chance. En route to India on business, he stopped over in Tokyo and visited the Tokyo National Museum. There, in Kimiko’s words, he achieved "enlightenment" and became convinced that Japanese art was "what he was looking for."

This was but one of many personal anecdotes that Kimiko Powers shared with the Denver audience who gathered for her conversation with Curator Ronald Otsuka. It was a great privilege to welcome her to Denver, since this was the first opportunity to hear her speak about the collection since it was placed on loan to the Denver Art Museum.

Kimiko told how, after John’s fortuitous visit to Tokyo, she and her late husband spent almost three months a year in Japan over a period of about twenty years in the 1960s and 1970s and studiously built their collection, now regarded as unparalleled in the Western world. Their timing was ideal. The Japanese economy had not yet recovered after the war years, and Japanese collectors with purchasing power were few and far between. Local art scholars and dealers naturally welcomed their interest, though Kimiko and John needed patience and creative thinking to make the case for their taking certain objects out of Japan.

They bought very carefully, avoiding art relating to the tea ceremony, for example, that the Japanese collectors treasured, and therefore was harder to come by and more expensive. However they did make mistakes, which Kimiko believes to be "part of the collecting game." In one disappointing experience, they returned to a dealer a painting that certain scholars had advised them was a fake–only for that verdict to be reversed, and the painting to be snapped up by the Kyoto National Museum and put on display there the following year!

Kimiko was a magnetic presence. Clad in an elegant Issey Miyake design accented with a Picasso-designed gold pendant, she enthralled the audience as she spoke of her husband’s great passion for Japanese art. She also revealed that her personal love was calligraphy, and read some of her favorite lines from scrolls in their collection. During the workshop the following day, her tour of the Japan Gallery focused on early Buddhist sculpture, calligraphy and paintings, and was truly a "wonderful experience," as Otsuka remarked at the conclusion.



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