Japan. Arts and Life

The Montgomery Collection.

Set up on two floors of Villa Malpensata, home of MUSEC, the major exhibition Japan. Arts and Life presents to the public one hundred and seventy works from the Montgomery Collection, one of the largest and best known collections of Japanese art outside Japan. The collection takes in artworks dating from the 12th to the 20th century, including textiles, furniture, paintings, religious and everyday objects - carefully selected from the over one thousand objects collected over a lifetime by Jeffrey Montgomery.

Renowned worldwide, the collection displays an extraordinary richness and a very singular substance: it is a collection of ‘oriental art’, and at the same time it expressed a “folk culture” reinterpreted in very elevated aesthetic terms by the elegant and refined choices made by the collector who had dedicated his entire life to it.

Jeffrey Montgomery's experience and sensitivity are at the heart of the project developed by MUSEC and mark its originality, compared to the way his collection has been interpreted until now.