A Rediscovered Japanese Treasure from a New York Closet Goes on View at Asia Week

Scholten Japanese Art, a New York gallery specializing in Japanese art, has opened its Asia Week Autumn 2026 season with an exhibition titled Rediscovered Treasures: The León Chattah Collection of Modern Japanese Prints. The show brings together seventy works by 20th-century masters of shin hanga—the "new prints" movement that revitalized Japanese woodblock printing by blending Western techniques with the traditions of ukiyo-e—from a collection that had remained hidden for decades.

The collection had been tucked away at the back of a closet in a New York City apartment since the early 1980s. It belonged to León Chattah (1934–2025), and was recently rediscovered by his family. The entire group is said to have been acquired all at once from Abraham and Rachel Bornstein, proprietors of the Boston Book and Art Shop, founded in 1923 and located at 657 Boylston Street, across from the Boston Public Library. The shop was known for distributing books from leading European publishers and for independently publishing fine books, art portfolios, and monographs. A profile of Abraham Bornstein published in the Boston Sunday Globe on August 26, 1962, attests to the shop's significance in the cultural milieu of the time.

The exhibition thus reveals a little-known facet of shin hanga production, a movement embodied by artists such as Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi, whose works were often collected outside Japan. The provenance of this group—a Boston bookstore that became a meeting point for Japanese art enthusiasts—adds a historical dimension to the rediscovery.

Presented during Asia Week, when New York galleries and museums celebrate Asian arts, Rediscovered Treasures offers a rare chance to see prints that had not been shown for more than forty years. It should appeal to both specialists and lovers of beautiful images, and serves as a reminder that treasures can sometimes slumber in the shadow of a simple closet.

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Written by the ADM desk based on artdaily. Read the original article for the full story.