Important Cultural Properties on display

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Collection (main building) contains 15 items that have been designated by the Japanese government as Important Cultural Properties. These include nine Nihon-ga (Japanese-style) paintings, five oil paintings, and one sculpture. (One of the Nihon-ga paintings and one of the oil paintings are on long-term loan to the museum.)

The following Important Cultural Properties are shown in this period:

• Harada Naojiro , Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon, 1890, Long term loan (Gokokuji Temple Collection)
• Yorozu Tetsugoro, Nude Beauty, 1912
• Kishida Ryusei, Road Cut through a Hill, 1915
• Please visit the Important Cultural Property section Masterpieces for more information about the pieces.

4F (Fourth floor)

Room 1 Highlights * This section presents a consolidation of splendid works from the collection, with a focus on Master Pieces.
Room 2– 5 1900s－1940s
　From the End of the Meiji Period to the Beginning of the Showa Period

A Room With A View
Reference Corner is currently out of service.

Room 1 (Exhibit Dates: June 16–June 21) Highlights

The MOMAT Collection exhibition, drawn from the museum’s holdings, consists of over 200 works displayed over a 3,000-square meter area. The exhibition starts with the “Highlights” section, consisting of some of the collection’s most essential works.

In the Nihon-ga (modern Japanese-style painting) genre, we present Ogura Yuki’s Bathing Women. This is an epoch-making work in that a female artist painted nude figures, which was highly unusual in Nihon-ga at that time.

Oil paintings on view include Harada Naojiro’s Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon (an Important Cultural Property), Kishida Ryusei’s Road Cut through a Hill, and other works critical to the development of modern Japanese painting. Other highlights include works by female painters such as Katsura Yuki and Maruki Toshi. Paintings by non-Japanese artists include work by Paul Cézanne, purchased in fiscal 2014 with a special budgetary allocation; Francis Bacon, whose paintings in Japanese public collections number only five; and a landscape by Gerhard Richter recently placed on long-term loan to the museum.

Room 1 (Exhibit Dates: June 23–October 25) Highlights

The MOMAT Collection exhibition, drawn from the museum’s holdings, consists of over 200 works displayed over a 3,000-square meter area. The exhibition starts with the “Highlights” section, consisting of some of the collection’s most essential works.

The glass cases contain exhibits, including craft works, relating to the relocation of the Crafts Gallery to Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. The Crafts Gallery, which after the renovation of the former headquarters of the Imperial Guards in Kitanomaru Park served as an exhibition venue for decorative arts from 1977 until this spring, will open as the National Crafts Museum at its new location in Kanazawa.

Meawhile, in the oil painting area, paintings on view include Kishida Ryusei’s Road Cut through a Hill and other works critical to the development of modern Japanese painting. Other highlights include works by female painters such as Katsura Yuki and Maruki Toshi. Paintings by non-Japanese artists include work by Paul Cézanne, purchased in fiscal 2014 with a special budgetary allocation; Francis Bacon, whose paintings in Japanese public collections number only five; and a landscape by Gerhard Richter recently placed on long-term loan to the museum.

Room 2 Light, Color, and Emotion – Focus on Pointillism

Pointillism is a style in which images are rendered with groups of dots or short brushstrokes, placed side by side or layered. This technique was developed in 19th-century Europe, particularly by Impressionists such as Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Neo-Impressionists such as Georges Seurat (1859–1891) who pursued “divided brushstroke” techniques based on optical theory, as a means of depicting light without losing the true luminosity of colors under sunlight. It was also an effective way for painters to express their emotions through brushwork. Meanwhile, Japanese painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were already accustomed to ink painting in which rocks, moss on tree trunks, leaves and so forth are rendered using dots and short strokes of ink. When they encountered the new modern Western styles, they were inspired to focus on pointillistic expression as a means of capturing vivid natural scenery in sunlight and the artist’s subjective impressions. In this room, we present works by painters who employed pointillism and stippling (short brushstrokes) as they sought to convey momentary impressions from, and emotions evoked by, the natural world.

Room 3 Muses Inspiring Artists

In one of Henri Rousseau’s paintings, the goddess of liberty blows a bugle, beckoning painters to take part in the Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Three years after this painting, Rousseau produced another entitled Muse Inspiring the Poet (1909), with which the title of this section paraphrases. The painting depicts the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the female painter Marie Laurencin, a source of inspiration for him, standing side by side. Around the same time, in Japan the sculptor Ogiwara Morie was expressing his unprofessed feelings for his patron Soma Kokko, the female proprietor of Shinjuku Nakamuraya, in works such as Priest Mongaku and Woman. There are many other examples, especially during this period, of women who were muses to male artists, as Alma Mahler was to Oskar Kokoschka. Today, we are likely to ask the question: “Well, what about the opposite? Who inspired female artists?” Under the keen gazes of the women depicted in these paintings, viewers may be inspired to rethink aspects of gender roles in art.

Room 4 Ohara Koson (Shoson)

Ukiyo-e, popular with city dwellers during the Edo Period (1603-1868), gradually declined from the Meiji Era (1868-1912) onward as new printing techniques from the West, such as lithography and photography, made inroads in Japan. However, there was also a contingent of printmakers that aimed to revitalize the traditions of ukiyo-e. It grew increasingly prominent during the Taisho Era (1912-1926) and came to be known as the Shin-hanga (new prints) movement, producing many works that were exported and prized overseas. Among the best-known figures are Hashiguchi Goyo and Ito Shinsui, who specialized in bijinga (lit. “pictures of beautiful women”), and landscape printmaker Kawase Hasui, but this exhibit focuses on Ohara Koson (a.k.a. Shoson), known for his works in the flower-and-bird genre. He began as a Nihonga (modern Japanese-style painting) artist and went by the name Koson, but in 1926 he adopted the name Shoson and went on to gain popularity with a large number of flower-and-bird prints both realistic and decorative in character, produced at the Shin-hanga printmaking studio Watanabe Hangaten. Thereafter he was largely forgotten in Japan, but there are large collections of his works in the Netherlands and the US, and recently he has been enjoying a critical reappraisal in his home country as well. The MOMAT collection contains works formerly belonging to ukiyo-e scholar Fujikake Shizuya, and here we present 32 of them, divided into a first and a second term.

3F (Third floor)

Room 6-8 1940s-1960s
　From the Beginning to the Middle of the Showa Period
Room 9 Photography and Video
Room 10 Nihon-ga (Japanese-style Painting)

Room to Consider the Building

Room 6 1943 The 2nd Great East Asia War Art Exhibition

Military art, also known as war record paintings, was art officially commissioned by the Japanese military to document World War II in the Asia-Pacific region. The military chose themes, painters were dispatched to battle zones to gather material and produce works, and after completion the wartime authorities collected the works and exhibited them in various locations around Japan. Here, we present paintings from the 2nd Great East Asia War Art Exhibition, held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in December 1943 and January 1944. This was one of the largest exhibitions of such art during the war, and also traveled to Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Sasebo, and Nagoya over the course of six months. During 1943 Japan’s situation had worsened, with various setbacks including withdrawal from Guadalcanal, the total annihilation of the forces defending Attu, and the departure of students for the front, while at home people’s living conditions were growing increasingly severe. Nonetheless, according to the Tokyo exhibition’s organizers, the number of attendees exceeded 150,000 in one month.

All of the works in this room were originally shown at the 2nd Great East Asia War Art Exhibition. What did people see, what did they think about, when they viewed the works at that time, and how do they appear to us today?

Room 7 Restless Bodies

At a time when the aftereffects of the Pacific War were still very pronounced, a variety of artists made works depicting introspective and depressed people as a way of quietly expressing their opposition to the turbulent social conditions.

Kazuki Yasuo was interned in Siberia after the war. After being sent home, he adopted a completely different artistic style, focusing on people who had suffered at the hands of society. These works might also be seen as self-portraits of a grief-stricken artist who fell victim to harsh circumstances.

Oyamada Jiro and Nakano Jun make use of dining tables, the artists fill the canvas with vivid brushstrokes, depicting dark scenes that are far removed from the pleasure of eating and enjoying each other’s company. The gloomy expressions and fragmented lifeless bodies reflect the atmosphere in a society faced with the reality that life is interchangeable.

Room 8 Circles and the Avant-Garde

Surveying Japanese art of the 1960s and the years immediately before and after, one gets a sense of energy and excitement pervading avant-garde art, like that which propelled movements such as American Abstract Expressionism.

In Japanese abstraction, in terms of motifs, one notices the prevalence of circles. For example, Onosato Toshinobu said that for him, the circle was of vital importance as the “original, primal form of all things.” Meanwhile, both Sugai Kumi and Yoshihara Jiro made not imitating others a personal credo, and it is interesting that both arrived after extensive explorations at the simple geometric figure of the circle. Furthermore, Sugai’s and Yoshihara’s circles are all in primary or other basic colors, and are painted so as to leave a minimum of visible brushstrokes. In this stance we can see a reaction to or backlash against the Art Informel (a French term meaning “non-formal art,” broadly describing a school of gestural abstraction) that arrived on Japanese shores in the 1950s.

Room 9 The Bauhaus and Its Legacy

Established in Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus was a school of art and design that offered comprehensive arts education focusing on architecture, and exerted an enormous and enduring influence on the development of modern design. László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian national who began teaching there in 1923, and added photography to the school curriculum. He defined photography as an “art of light,” and opened up new possibilities in photography as a visual medium, including the camera-less technique of photograms and the photomontage.

In 1937 Moholy-Nagy was invited to Chicago, where he opened the New Bauhaus (incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1955). He carried on the Bauhaus legacy while pursuing a new design education model that fused art, science and technology. This school is also known as one of the United States’ most forward-looking institutions of photographic education, and its philosophy and practices were absorbed into the Japanese photography world through the activities of Bauhaus graduate Ishimoto Yasuhiro and the writings of Moholy-Nagy.

This special exhibit is in conjunction with the come to bauhaus! exhibition touring five museums in Japan to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus’s foundation. Related exhibits are also on view in Room 10 and in the Art Library.

Room 10 (First half: June 16–August 23) Landscape in Fine and Decorative Arts / Special Bauhaus Exhibit

The exhibit in the rear of this room focuses on how natural phenomena such as rain, wind, snow, clouds, water, and the atmosphere have been rendered in modern Japanese landscape paintings, prints and decorative arts. In the late 19^th century, ukiyo-e prints inspired Western artists and contributed to the emergence of new modes of expression. Meanwhile, Japanese painters and artisans were encountering Western styles and transforming their own work. Aspects of this endeavor can be seen in landscape paintings where ink and diluted watercolor are used in combination, and in the blurred, outline-free morotai style developed by Yokoyama Taikan and others.

In the space closer at hand is our Special Bauhaus Exhibit. The Bauhaus was an art and design school that first opened in Weimar, Germany in 1919 and later moved to Dessau and then to Berlin, where it was forced to close in 1933 under Nazi repression. In the 14 years of its short existence, the Bauhaus had some of the greatest artists of the day as teachers, maintained a focus on developments in contemporary society, and offered a unique education aimed at building new relationships between society and art. Its innovative philosophy and practices were transmitted both directly and indirectly to Japan through various people and objects. In this room, we present points of contact between the Bauhaus and Japan circa 1930, when the country was looking to the West for examples of “modernity.”

Room 10 (Second half: August 25–October 25) The Moon on an Autumn Night

In the space closer at hand is our Special Bauhaus Exhibit. The Bauhaus was an art and design school that first opened in Weimar, Germany in 1919 and later moved to Dessau and then to Berlin, where it was forced to close in 1933 under Nazi repression. In the 14 years of its short existence, the Bauhaus had some of the greatest artists of the day as teachers, maintained a focus on developments in contemporary society, and offered a unique education aimed at building new relationships between society and art. Its innovative philosophy and practices were transmitted both directly and indirectly to Japan through various people and objects. In this room, we present points of contact between the Bauhaus and Japan circa 1930, when the country was looking to the West for examples of “modernity.”

The glass case area in the rear of the room contains Nihon-ga (Japanese-style) painters’ works dealing with the moon. The moon is at its most brilliant in autumn, when the air becomes clear and pure. The late Heian Period (794–1185) poet Saigyo wrote a famous ode to the autumn moon: “Gazing at the autumn moon, its clear purity illuminates pain deep in the heart.” Why is it that many people, from ancient times to today, can sympathize with this feeling of sadness or longing when looking up at the moon? Modern artists have tried to unravel the mystery of the moon’s magical power over human beings.

2F (Second floor)

Room 11-12 1970s-2010s
　From the End of the Showa Period to the Present

Gallery 4

* A space of about 250 square meters. This gallery offers cutting-edge thematic exhibitions from the Museum Collection, and special exhibitions featuring photographs or design.

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