iTokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumUeno Park
The History of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
Free 100th-anniversary archives exhibition retracing the museum's century through documents, photographs and the people behind it.
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Preview: written before the show opened
In 1952 the calligrapher Bundō Shunkai worked a long-handled brush across a sheet spread on the floor, while a crowd several rows deep watched from the edges. A photograph of that day is one of the archive pieces the museum has chosen to tell its own first 100 years, along with an armchair made in 1926 for its imperial rest room.
It opens on Sato Keitaro, the Kitakyushu coal merchant whose ¥1 million donation paid for the building, then moves through the old and new buildings, the artist groups who showed here, the Western loan shows, the contemporary art years and the public art courses. You also get a colour-gradation triangle painted in 1983 by a participant in one of those courses, so someone's art-class homework made the centenary show.
It's free, in Gallery B, and Fridays run to 20:00 (last entry 19:30). Closed 7 December and 21 December to 3 January.
Look for
Bundō Shunkai's floor calligraphy (1952)
A photograph of the calligrapher sweeping a long-handled brush across a sheet laid on the floor, with spectators packed around its edges.
The 1926 imperial armchair
An armchair made for the museum's imperial rest room in its opening year, upholstered in patterned salmon-pink fabric with gilt mounts on the arms.
Bernard's Dance relief
A 1973 photograph of Joseph-Antoine Bernard's carved relief of dancing figures, which was installed at the front entrance of the old building.
Inoue Bukichi's my sky hole 85-2
A photograph of the polished steel sphere with a round hole in its side, reflecting the museum's red-brick building in its curve.
The 1975 new-building poster
The poster for the new building's opening, its red headline announcing that on 1 September the museum would be reborn.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Evening Visits
- Nerding Out
Also at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
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National Museum of Western Art
"Shōwa 100th": How Conservation and Restoration Evolved at the NMWA during the Shōwa Period — Van Gogh's Roses and Renoir's Woman with a Hat
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Turner: Painting the Sublime, in Dialogue with Contemporary Art
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Nearby
Image credits
5
- The History of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumCourtesy of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
- Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumJoe Mabel, CC BY-SA 2.0
- National Museum of Western ArtJoyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Museum of Nature and ScienceDaderot, CC0
- Tokyo National MuseumWiiii, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0