Sidney D. Gamble lecture series event
GREENE & GREENE'S VISION OF JAPAN
Presentation by Bruce Smith
Saturday, August 26, 2023
at the Neighborhood Church Pasadena, Sanctuary
3:00 p.m. - Japanese Folk Art Sale Preview
4:00 p.m. - Lecture
5:00 p.m. - Japanese Folk Art Sale, Reception and Book Signing
Tickets: $10 Members | $20 Non-Members
Charles and Henry Greene never visited Japan, yet they brought one of the most influential visions of Japan to America. Greene & Greene scholar Bruce Smith will speak to the sources of the two brothers’ inspiration, and how, through their architecture and design, they created a poetic, elegiac vision of Japan that came, in the end, more from themselves than it did from Japan.
Please join us at 3:00 p.m. for a preview of Japanese folk art objects that will be for sale during the reception and book signing following the presentation. 100% of the proceeds from the art sale, made possible through a generous anonymous donation, will benefit the Gamble House.
Bruce Smith is an independent researcher and writer who has focused on late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century decorative arts and architectural, and occasionally food. He is especially interested in the Japanese influence on American decorative arts, and is a specialist on the life and work of Charles and Henry Greene. His book on their architecture, Greene & Greene Masterworks (Chronicle Books, 1998) was one of the New York Times Editor’s Choice Architectural Books of the Year. He has also written Greene & Greene: Developing A California Architecture (Gibbs Smith, 2011) and contributed essays to A “New and Native” Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene (Merrell, 2008).