Mingei as a Study Topic = Il Mingei come argomento di studio

Relatore alla Tavola rotonda e relatore con intervento nella Sezione 3: “Mingei as a Study Topic / Il Mingei come argomento di studio”, Simposio internazionale Reconsidering Mingei / Riconsiderando il Mingei. Titolo dell’intervento in apertura: "The importance of instinct in the Jeffrey Montgomery Collection" In order to understand what is the meaning and how to approach the Mingei works, the founder of the movement, Sōetsu Yanagi, expressed his thought in some essays written in various moments of his life. In "Seeing and Knowing" of 1940 we notice some key concepts in Yanagi's thought: he says in fact that in the field of art, it is very important to follow and trust intuition rather than intellect because it is much closer to the essence of beauty and for this reason, it can grasp it better. For a true understanding of art, there must be an instinctive understanding, instinct is what we have unconscious, unknown, not adjustable and different for everyone and for this reason it is very close to beauty, another kind of mystery, difficult to explain in words and conceptually. The mind, on the other hand, merely observes what surrounds the art object and investigates what is known. The results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give life to intuition, but only accompany it. Collector Jeffrey Montgomery, owner of one of the largest collections of Mingei works in the world, unwittingly followed Yanagi's thought by creating his collection with which he demonstrated that the true approach to understanding and therefore collecting Mingei objects is the aesthetic one, which arises solely from the sensitivity and intuition of the human being, not from the intellectual sphere.