Art exhibitions
What we do
We organize art exhibitions working with museums in Japan and abroad.
In the earlier years, the Foundation was involved in supporting and organizing of some of the major exhibitions such as “Van Gogh and Japan”, hosted at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (1989), “Vincent Van Gogh”, with Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (1990), “The Boymans Masterpieces Exhibition” that featured “The Tower of Babel” by Peter Bruegel (1993). In 2000, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the treaty of amity between Japan and the Netherlands, we organized a major exhibition “The Public and the Private in the Age of Vermeer”. This exhibition showcased the rarest works borrowed from the major museums around the world, and closed in a great success.
In the more recent years, the Foundation hosted one of the largest exhibitions “Rembrandt, Rembrandt” at Kyoto National Museum in 2002. In 2007, we made a support for “The Age of Rembrandt” exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that was held from September 2007 through January 2008.
In 2008, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the conclusion of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the Western countries, we organized the exhibition "Vermeer and the Delft Style", at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. For this historic cultural event, we gathered seven paintings by Johannes Vermeer from all over the world, including “The Little Street”(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), “The Girl with Wineglass” (Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig) and “The Young Woman Seated at the Virginal”(Private Collection). This exhibition attracted more than 930,000 people, and became the third popular exhibition ever held in Japan.
“Communications: Visualizing the Human Connection in the Age of Vermeer” was held at three venues, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, The Miyagi Museum of Art, and Bunkamura the Museum in Tokyo, from June 2011 to March 2012. The exhibition was held in Miyagi prefecture less than a year after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011. Over 800,000 people visited to see this collection of works, which focused on the role of “letters” in Vermeer’s works of art.
From July 2012 to September 2013 we organized an international Van Gogh exhibition tour. Starting from the Palace Huis Ten Bosch Museum in Nagasaki, from November 2012 until March 2013 it toured to the Hangaram Design Museum in South Korea where they showed an exhibition focusing on Van Gogh’s life and career in Paris. This event marks the first time that the Portrait of Pere Tanguy was exhibited in Asia. From April 2013, the exhibition traveled to Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the Miyagi Museum of Art, and Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum showing 36 works to the Japanese audience for the first time, and a dramatic series of 8 self-portraits painted during his time in Paris. This exhibition provided a new perspective of the artist Vincent Van Gogh.
Regarding the support of museums abroad, we were very fortunate to be the sponsor of the exhibition, “Civic Pride: Group Portraits from Amsterdam” that is held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington from March 2012 to March 2017. In this exhibition there are two large-scale group portraits from the Dutch Golden Age, on long-term loan from the Rijksmuseum and the Amsterdam Museum. They highlight an extraordinary opportunity for visitors to enjoy a type of Dutch painting rarely seen outside the Netherlands.
In 2013 we have also supported “Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure” at the National Gallery, London. In 2014, we have supported “Rembrandt: The Late Works” exhibition at the National Gallery, London, and the “Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
