1893 expo’s historic Japanese panels reunited, restored
BY KARA SPAK Sun-Times Media August 14, 2011 10:08PM
Janice Katz, Associate Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the ramma, four wooden carving from the Japanese pavilion at World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, now in the Weston Wing and Japanese Art Galleries at the Art Institute, Friday, August 12, 2011. | John H. White~Sun-Times
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Updated: October 19, 2011 3:13AM
Four carved wooden panels from Japan’s pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition are together again after a 118-year journey that spanned Jackson Park, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the area underneath Soldier Field’s bleachers.
The Art Institute of Chicago is the new home to the four ramma, which were hung together in the museum’s Japanese Art Galleries earlier this month. The panels were originally the show-stopping centerpiece inside Phoenix Hall, Japan’s home at the 1893 exhibition that stood out among the expo’s “White City.”
“Wherever there is a place to put more decoration, more color, more gold leaf in a Japanese building, that opportunity is seized,” said Janice Katz, the Art Institute’s associate curator of Japanese art.
Each carved from two planks of wood, the panels feature colorful phoenixes, mythical birds that are a cross between a pheasant and a peacock believed to appear during a great leader’s reign. The scraggy-clawed, sharp-beaked birds live among pine trees and blue paulownia, the flower from the tree where the phoenix likes to land. Mating for life, the birds are shown on the panel with one bird’s mouth open and the other closed, a symbol of the dichotomy of life like the yin and the yang.
When the expo ended, Phoenix Hall and the panels were moved to Jackson Park, a gift to Chicago from the Japanese government. In 1935, a rundown Phoenix House was renovated into a teahouse, a place to stop for a sandwich and a drink. Two fires that were likely arson in 1945 and 1946 damaged the ramma and destroyed the building.
The park district stored the ravaged ramma under the bleachers at Soldier Field until the 1970s, when a crew prepping for an American bicentennial event found them. All four were in disrepair, covered in soot, their pigment faded.
Art Institute officials put their panels in storage. The other two were hung in the hallway of the art history building at UIC, said David Sokol, professor emeritus and the long-time head of the school’s art history department.
“The university has no real museum, though we have a really good gallery,” he said of why they were in a classroom building. “They were suffering from wear and tear and our inability to really care for them.”
Sokol said the school sought bids to restore them, but the money wasn’t there in the state university system. He approached the Art Institute, but a previous curator wasn’t interested. That started an on-and-off dialogue between museum and university officials that spanned a dozen years. The turning point came in 2005, when Katz went to UIC to see the ramma.
“Janice (Katz) really got into it,” Sokol said. “She really said yes, this is a fascinating and interesting historical artifact because of what they represent in the Japanese culture and their tie to the Columbian exhibition.”
UIC officials decided to donate the school’s two ramma to the Art Institute so the complete set could be restored and displayed together, something Katz said about which she was “so thankful.”
“It happened at the right time when we were renovating these (Japanese) galleries,” she said. “This is the last piece of the puzzle of the renovated galleries.”
In September 2010, the Art Institute sent all four panels to a restoration shop in Evanston where the ramma were cleaned, the birds’ beaks re-carved and all four were repainted to appear as if they had “aged gracefully,” Katz said.
“It was so complicated,” Katz said. “We’re not normally in the business of restoration. We’re normally in the business of conservation.”
The ramma were installed Aug. 1 and 2, all four panels together, on display for the first time in more than 60 years.
“I think we’ve done the right thing,” Sokol said. “The public can benefit from it. To see it in this setting will be much more meaningful. Seeing them with the others the whole tale can be told.”
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