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Joe D. Price is posing for pictures in front of a 17th-Century Japanese screen before which feudal warlords once sat to receive their subjects. A latter-day ruler of Edo art treasures from Japan, Price seems about as pleased as an ornery samurai. His chin juts forward, his gray hair swirls like an unruly wreath around his balding pate, and his sometimes venomous tongue darts out of his mouth.
"I don't know what you need so many pictures for," he chides the photographer. "I've never had so many pictures taken in my life. Before," he adds, "nobody knew I existed."
That changed in 1983, when the Oklahoma millionaire gave his collection of 300 Japanese masterpieces, worth an estimated $30 million to $40 million, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with $5 million in seed money to build a pavilion to house the art. The gift, as well as construction of the pavilion, now under way, have thrust Price, 57, into the public eye.
He is greeting the attention with a mixture of truculence, ingenuousness and delight. He laughs, lobs caustic barbs, and speaks with a stammer. He likes to call himself a country boy-an Okie from the prairies-yet the way he says it reminds you that Mark Twain, Abe Lincoln and other fellows were just country boys too.
His knowledge of the long-neglected paintings of the Edo period has been widely recognized by scholars of Japanese art. Says Earl A. (Rusty) Powell, director of the County Museum: "He can spot an Edo-period screen going 90 miles an hour in a Tokyo taxicab." Price insists, however, that at the start he didn't even know he was collecting Japanese, much less Edo, art. "I just liked it. I don't know why," he says, blinking behind clear-rimmed glasses.
Price's wife, Etsuko, is Japanese, and long before he met her, he was taking off his shoes before entering his bachelor pad. "I already had a Japanese feeling, but I did not know it," he says.
But if his original attraction to Japanese art was instinctive, his collecting grew to be single-minded, surpassing the devotion of many connoisseurs.
Now his collection-which he named Shin'enkan, or "the house of the faraway heart," for the art studio of Edo...