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However, if you would like to, you can change your cookie settings at any time. About the exhibition Masterpieces of Japanese Art in Polish Collections, the exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary of the Manggha Museum, is a presentation of old Japanese art, primarily from the Edo period β , and also β in some examples β the Meiji era β : ukiyo-e woodblock prints, paintings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics, bronze wares, lacquerware, and militaria.
This was so because the specifically Japanese criteria of beauty are principally contradictory to the European tradition, founded on the classical ideals of antiquity; the typical values of Japanese aesthetics form a system which stands in pronounced opposition to the traditional aesthetics of the West, with its notion of ideal beauty based on harmony, symmetry, rhythm, the principle of mimesis, the postulate of durability in art, the division into high and applied art.
The Japanese concept of beauty is strongly pervaded with a sense of transience, the impermanence of things, and the related melancholy.
This is a mysterious beauty, and the typical characteristics of that art β understatement, vagueness and ambiguity β are decisive for the intuitive reception of it. Beautiful objects: lacquerware sprinkled with gold, a brocade kimono, a gilded screen, when placed in dim Japanese interiors never in bright light!
