THE TRADITIONS OF JAPANESE CERAMICS

The article focuses on an important topic - the traditions of Japanese ceramics. Its relevance lies in the importance of solving the problem of identifying artworks: whether they are fake or original. Incorrect attribution of an item can lead to severe legal and material consequences and significantly affect the reputation. Differences between the terms “a copy” and “a forgery” with the assessment of positive and negative aspects of falsification are revealed. Highly qualified specialists with certificates and diplomas are required to identify and attribute art. The article shows the main requirements they must have. It also highlights and covers the characteristics and central problem of Western art, describes the ideology of Eurocentrism, according to which Europe, or the West, is the highest stage of human civilization; the rest of the world is considered primitive and undeveloped. A vivid example of an error in identifying a work of art by the Getty Museum - the sculpture Head with Horns and several cases of creating grandiose first-class forgeries in the art of Japanese ceramics are presented in the article. The works of such artists as Kato Tokuro, a ceramic artist whose works have won the highest artistic award in Japan and are widely recognized among collectors and curators of the West, Kagami Shukai, and Kato Koju have been studied. The article describes the Setoceramic tradition and its significance for common cultural art. It was created by the great Kato Shirozaemon and got its name from the name of the city in Japan, famous for its pottery. The article shows the importance of traditional methods in Japanese ceramic art history. Hence the desire of masters to follow ancient patterns and techniques. The article also describes the features and reveals the differences between traditional and Studio ceramics. The characteristics of the Asian approach, which aims to reproduce cultural values in an unchanged form, parallel with the development of progress in other areas, are studied. The article’s main task is to teach how to detect an obvious forgery by analyzing genuine ceramic products’ characteristic features. For this purpose, significant analysis of the distinctive features of authentic ceramic products is given. Several techniques and methods for determining the authenticity of the exhibit are presented.

Japanese Ceramics

From its inception in the late 19th century up to the 1970s, modern scholarship in Japanese ceramics was largely bifurcated into archaeology-based studies of pre- and early-historical wares and art-historical investigations of wares from later periods. The former relied on stratigraphic and typological methods. Extensive excavations began in the 1920s, and within two decades a chronology of prehistoric pottery up to the 3rd century had been established for all of the main islands. Successive generations of archaeologists have built on that foundation to create what must be the most complex prehistoric pottery classification system in the world. The efforts of art and craft historians, on the other hand, drew from premodern descriptions of local industries, and especially from the traditions of connoisseurship and collecting developed in the tea ceremony, which focused on form and provenance in a select group of utensils produced or collected in Japan. From the 1910s, influenced by Western aesthetics, the old hierarchy expanded into a “ceramic art” canon that included under- and overglaze decorated wares, notably in porcelain. Supported by a postwar enthusiasm for Japanese traditional culture and development-driven archaeology, ceramics as both art and artifact received broad exposure in exhibitions and publishing both domestically and overseas. Bridges between the archaeological and art-historical approaches appeared in the last two decades of the 20th century with the acceleration of kiln- and user-site excavations. With access to staggering amounts of information on how ceramics of all periods were made, traded, and used, art historians now embrace the findings if not the actual methods of the archaeologist. At the same time, mirroring trends in Western studies of material culture, Japanese ceramics studies as a whole have become more self-reflexive and context-sensitive, and now include critical inquiry into identity-making, collecting, consumer demand, and regionality. Scholarly interest in modern (post-1868) ceramics has also increased considerably since the mid-1990s. Japanese-language literature in every aspect of this field is vast, but here those contributions are limited to reference works, benchmark publications, and select topics that are not covered in English or other Western languages; when English is included in those works, it is noted in the respective entry.

Una collezione dimenticata: le porcellane orientali della marchesa Vittoria Toschi Mosca

The eight hundred Chinese and Japanese ceramics, donated to the city of Pesaro by Vittoria Toschi Mosca and now housed in the Musei Civici, are little known and have remained in storage for more than sixty years despite being one of the largest collection of export porcelain in Italy. This paper introduces an ongoing research project into their history and heralds their study and publication.