With this project, MUSEC celebrates a passion for collecting and a heritage of great artistic and cultural value. A heritage that gives prestige to Lugano, thus consolidating the historic ties of the Ticino city with private Swiss and international art collecting. The collector's experience and sensitivity are at the center of the project and mark its originality, compared to the way his collection has been interpreted up to now. As Francesco Paolo Campione, director of MUSEC, writes in his introductory text to the exhibition catalog: «all art collections have a meaning and a profound value only if linked to the existential dimension and the human experience of those who wanted them, designed and concretized around itself. The collector is indispensable to the collection: not only because he made it, but because he ensures its originality, interpreting the spirit of the time ». The exhibition presents to the public 170 works dating back to the period between the twelfth and twentieth centuries - including fabrics, furnishings, paintings, cult and everyday objects - carefully selected from the over a thousand objects collected during the life of Jeffrey Montgomery.
How did your relationship with MUSEC start?
«The collaboration began in 2008 and materialized for the first time in 2010 with the Ineffable Perfection exhibition at Villa Ciani (Lugano), where about forty works embellished the itinerary focused on hand-painted photographs of Japan from the late nineteenth century. From that first lucky meeting, a special bond of intellectual and human solidarity developed over the years, without haste, waiting for the conditions to realize a more ambitious project. A truly innovative project, capable of restoring to the public not only the value that these works in my collection have compared to the culture that produced them, as it has been until today, but also and above all the value they possess in the vision of world of those who have collected them for decades, with intense intellectual love. The growth of MUSEC and its transfer in 2017, from the original Heleneum headquarters to the larger and more central Villa Malpensata, allow today to fully share with the public the fruits of the dialogue developed over the years ".
Why can the objects in your collection be defined as a journey into the "beauty of simplicity"?
«I do not consider myself the master, but rather a keeper, the lucky keeper of a patrimony of objects linked together by a secret form of solidarity. The collected works are as many tools to approach and discover the innumerable sides of Japanese culture, which I have always felt particularly close to my sensitivity. The backbone of my vision of the world concerns the beauty of simplicity, considered as a hidden and profound guide. The rarefied refinement that characterizes certain genres of Japanese art, such as paintings, fabrics and lacquers, is almost ineffably combined with the austere and, in many ways, rough simplicity of everyday objects. It is an almost oxymoronic combination that is capable of producing masterpieces that fascinate because they are able to combine the deepest authenticity with the taste of the essential. Things that, if you do not pause carefully to look at them, may escape you but which, if you are able to observe them for a long time, as if to grasp their essence, generate within the viewer an inexorable sensation of beauty ».
In the works on display you can also read the harmony with nature and respect for tradition ...
«Beauty is authentic when it is inspired by the forms of nature, perfect in their absolute imperfection. Personal creativity and artistic individuality are not at the top of the value ladder of Japanese art. Not because these are despised values, but because all kinds of works are first and foremost the result of the artist's ability to express the skills handed down by his ancestors. Skills that have their origin in the mists of time, making the artist feel part of an uninterrupted beauty story. Using a Western term, we could call this value with the name of "tradition", also associating it with the sense of a research that has taught man the importance of working in harmony with nature and with a profoundly religious respect for "secrets" of the profession, to continue to make the world better. In this sense, the work of art expresses a materiality which, far from being technical, as it generally happens in the Western world, rather refers to the idea of an incessant transformation of the world and to the feeling of incurable nostalgia that this transformation entails. ".
The culmination of Jeffrey Montgomery's passion for collecting can only be of an existential nature. His works do not generate a material accumulation but remain isolated, each with its own specific identity, as tools capable of arousing and accompanying a real spiritual journey on the meaning of life. If there is commonality, it can be traced, beyond the forms, in an ancient and proper value of the civilization that generated them so that inner peace passes through the acceptance of the fact that nothing is finished, that nothing is perfect and that nothing tough.
The works exhibited in the 13 rooms along which the exhibition unfolds compose both a journey through the collector's inner world and an art journey into the aesthetic ideals of Japan.
Jeffrey Montgomery
Born in California in 1937 to a Norwegian mother and an English father, at the age of three he moved with his father to England, where he remained until the age of fourteen, before returning to his mother who lives in the United States. At the age of nineteen he begins a nomadic life, during which he begins to collect Japanese art and folk art. In 1969 he moved permanently to Lugano where he settled with his life partner and wife Mariangela.
