Samurai Thoughts

At the Portland Art Museum we were confronted with three Samurai warriors mounted on Steiff-like horses, also in complete armor, an imposing sight that must have been overwhelming to Edo era Japanese who rarely caught a glimpse of such magnificence.

Samurai started as warriors in Japan about 1100 C.E. who became a segment of society wielding varying degrees of wealth and power for some 800 years and even today spark the imagination of the world in ways similar to that of the cowboy of the American West—adventures in tales, books, film—which may explain part of the attraction of the PAM exhibit: 140 items in a traveling show from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection in Dallas, Texas.  Except for the examples in the entrance hall, most of the exhibits were within Plexiglas displays, making photography difficult but perhaps adding to the mystique.

The exhibits ranged from elaborate masks and helmets to complete outfits, all in pristine condition, from the 14th through the 19th centuries.  Although presented as battle gear, clearly none of these had ever seen a skirmish.

In fact, most of the Samurai accoutrement available today postdates the establishment in 1615 of the Tokugawa military dictatorship which brought an end to battle but left Samurai families among the elite (even though one of the elaborate cuirasses had two pock marks, evidence of bullets fired by the maker to prove its protective qualities against new weapons).

As I worked through the displays, I was entranced by the artistry but conflicted.  These were clearly costumes created by the super wealthy and powerful, in a society largely made up of poor farmers, for play and display.

One costume, a miniature complete in every respect, was constructed for a child's coming of age party, and, one assumes, despite the hours—months even—to construct, almost as soon as the party was over the recipient must have outgrown it—not unlike, I suppose, marriage gowns in the West and marriage saris in India: hugely expensive, worn once, then stored for a generation or two.  The adult costumes showed little evidence of having been utilized more.

This collection, touted as "one of the finest and most comprehensive collections [of Samurai artifacts] in the world," assembled over 25 years by Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller and their children, is now almost 1,000 items and growing.

The Barbier-Muellers established a museum in Dallas to display the collection, mimicking actions of previous generations of the family who set up museums for their collections in Europe and Africa, Gilded Age consumption conspicuous enough to rival that of the Samurai class itself.

Also on display at PAM was the 1969 triptych of Lucian Freud perched on a wooden chair by Freud's friend and rival, Francis Bacon, which recently made news by garnering the highest price at auction paid to date for an art work: $142.4 million.  (The price topped the previous record of $119.9 million for Edvard Munch's The Scream—which we saw in New York and which can be found elsewhere in this blog.)  In both cases, the buyer was a bidder who wished to remain anonymous but who was willing to display the trophy publicly before hiding it for private pleasure.

Post script:  Art world sources say the buyer of the Bacon triptych was Elaine Wynn, a co-founder of the Wynn Casino Empire, who has, according to Forbes, a net worth of $1.9 billion.  The median net worth of U.S. households, as of 2011 according to the Census Bureau, was $68,828.

And a further note:  According to the New York Times (4/13/14), by shipping the painting first to Oregon, instead of her home in Las Vegas, Wynne may be eligible to avoid as much as $11 million in Nevada use taxes.