Elegant Enigmas in Japan

In life, Edward Gorey rarely traveled far from his home and only ventured abroad once. Elegant Enigmas, the definitive Edward Gorey retrospective exhibition, has traveled extensively across the United States since 2009. For the past year or so the show has been exhibited in various cities across Japan. The show's Japanese tour will make its ninth stop at the Niitsu Art Museum in Tokyo beginning January 19, 2019.

Elegant Enigmas features original art, books, and ephemera culled from the Edward Gorey Archives. The materials on display will often vary slightly for each venue. At each stop, the personal collection from a regional collector is often featured alongside the Estate materials. A catalog of the core exhibition was published in 2009 (see my post goreyana.blogspot.com/2009/02/reference-materials-part-1.html).

For the Japanese exhibitions, a new catalog has been produced. This oversized glossy paperback shows snippets from the core collection, but the main focus is on the supplemental materials from several collectors (from the layout, I assume it is from several collectors - I don't read Japanese). The pieces shown include original artwork lent from private collections as well as many items not pictured in the American volume. There are interviews and profiles of several collectors as well as a new interview with Andreas Brown, trustee of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and former owner of Gotham Book Mart. Unfortunately for those of us that are not multilingual, all of the information in the catalog is written in Japanese.

This slight hiccup should not deter the serious collector from obtaining a copy of this catalog. The format, photography, and layout of the catalog is visually stunning and is sure to influence the look of future exhibition catalogs whose layout often resembles a checklist. The best way to obtain one of these catalogs is through eBay listings from Japan.