Peter Drucker and Japanese Art: Scholar in a Landscape

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In June 1934, at the age of 24, long before he became known as “the father of modern management,” Peter Drucker was walking home from work in London and was suddenly caught in a rainstorm. He sought shelter in Burlington Arcade, a covered shopping area next to the Royal Academy of Arts. By chance, he discovered a traveling exhibition of Japanese paintings and stayed for two transformative hours. Many years later, he wrote: “Not only had I discovered a new universe of art; I had discovered something about myself. I had experienced a touch, a small touch to be sure but a genuine one, of enlightenment.”

While working in Washington, D.C. during World War II, Drucker had a lunch hour ritual: studying works of Japanese art at The Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art, on the National Mall. In 1999, as he was turning 90, he recalled that the museum staff was “awfully kind to me and gave me a table downstairs in the stacks and let me look at paintings that restored my sanity.”

Drucker and his wife of 68 years, Doris Drucker, developed a major collection of Japanese art, the Sanso Collection. He even taught about the subject for several years, in the early 1980s at Pomona College, part of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California; while he was also teaching management at what is now called Claremont Graduate University, several years before the management school was named for him.

This appreciation ultimately led to his fascination with Japan as a country, where he became revered as a best-selling author, but especially as one who saw the cultural, economic, and managerial promise the country held for the rest of the world.

Drucker's approach to Japan

In the 1993 book, The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition, Drucker writes that his “…approach to Japan has not been through economics or business. It has been through Japanese art and through Japanese history—the result of my falling in love with Japanese painting when still a very young man and an economist working for a London merchant bank. I did not actually travel to Japan until the mid-'50s. But I had by then lived with Japanese culture for 20 years.”

Part seven of the book, “Japan as Society and Civilization,” contains some of Drucker’s most personal and wide-ranging writing on many aspects of Japanese life, including a 17-page essay, “A View of Japan Through Japanese Art,” originally written for the catalog of a 1979 Seattle Art Museum exhibit, Song of the Brush: Japanese Paintings from the Sansō Collection. In the introduction to the book section on Japan, he writes that “Japan’s native culture, unlike that of any other country, is totally perceptual. It is built around painting and calligraphy.” In Drucker on Asia, a book of dialogues between Drucker and the late Japanese retail executive Isao Nakauchi published in an English translation in 1997, he relates that “As you know, I have been interested in Japanese art for more than 60 years. One of the things that attracted me to it—and still fascinates me—is the tremendous individuality of the Japanese artist.”

Role in cultural and economic development

Drucker became a major figure in Japan, as an advisor to corporations and individuals. He is credited as one of several Westerners, such as the TQM/Total Quality Management guru W. Edwards Deming, who helped inspire the cultural and economic development of the country post-World War II. He was also an early voice in taking Japan seriously as an economic engine, especially in such pieces as “What We Can Learn From Japanese Management,” published in 1971 by Harvard Business Review. Drucker claims that the article was “the first Western report on such now thoroughly familiar practices as consensus decisions, lifetime employment, long-range strategy, {and} quality control.”

Drucker ultimately became an advisor and consultant to the Japan Society in New York City, as well as the Japan House Gallery. He was also a commissioner of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and a member of the Asian art council of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In a 1994 Pomona College Magazine article, “Landscapes of the Mind,” Suzanne Muchnic, at the time the art writer for the Los Angeles Times, interviewed Drucker about an exhibit of the Sanso collection at the college’s Montgomery Gallery. She writes that “what interests him in Japanese art is not only the fine points of its styles, techniques, subjects, and creators but how it fits into world art history and what makes it special.”

Exploring space

One work of art in the show, by Tanomura Chikuden (1777-1836), is appropriately titled Scholar in a Landscape. Drucker contended in the article that “Western art since the Renaissance and the introduction of perspective has been essentially geometric. Chinese art is algebraic. It’s all about ratios. Japanese art is topological. The basis of Japanese art is exploring space.”

During the Drucker Centennial celebrations in 2009, I attended the opening of an exhibit, “Zen! Japanese Paintings From the Sanso Collection,” at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, on the campus of Scripps College, part of the Claremont Colleges. I returned several days later for another Japanese-themed exhibit, “Genji’s World in Japanese Woodblock Prints.” Maybe it was because it was late on a Friday afternoon, but I had the gallery all to myself.

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I sensed Drucker’s spiritual and artistic presence, and believe that he would have loved to be in the same position, with all the time in the world to view and attempt to try to understand these works of art.