Artizon Museum
The Artizon Museum, Ishibashi Foundation, formerly known as the Bridgestone Museum of Art, opened in January 2020 as a new museum at the same location, Kyobashi, Tokyo. The new name ARTIZON was coined by combining the words ART and HORIZON, to reflect its determination to imapart a sense of this horizon of pioneering art to people. The concept of the museum is "experiencing creativity". In addition to the Impressionists and Japanese Western-style paintings from the modern period for which Ishibashi Foundation Collection has been renowned, new acquisitions include post war Abstract paintings and early Japanese arts from the Edo period, enlarging the breadth and depth of the collection. These additions to the collection make it possible to mount exhibitions that cover ancient to contemporary art. The Artizon Museum is located at the lower section of the 23-story "Museum Tower Kyobashi" and the galleries comprise of three floors with the latest equipment, to present the varied pleasures of art.
Artizon Museum Official App provides information on the Artizon Museum and its collection in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. Visitors may use the free audio guide by connecting to its free guest WiFi service while inside the museum. To listen to the audio guide, please bring your own smartphone and earphones.
Main works
AOKI Shigeru《A Gift of the Sea》1904 Oil on canvas (important cultural property)
Aoki was born in Shojima-machi, Kurume, in Fukuoka. In 1899, intending to become an artist, he left Fukuoka Prefectural Meizen Middle School in Kurume to go to Tokyo and enter Koyama Shotaro’s Fudosha painting school. In 1900, he was admitted to the Western Painting Faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In 1903, he showed his Yomotsuhirasaka and other paintings on mythological themes at the eighth Hakubakai Exhibition, winning the Hakuba Award. In 1904, after graduating in July from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Aoki went with Sakamoto Hanjiro, Morita Tsunetomo, and Fukuda Tane to Mera, a fishing port in Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture. During his stay there, which continued until the end of August, he produced A Gift of the Sea and other superb paintings on maritime themes. He showed A Gift of the Sea at the ninth Hakubakai Exhibition that fall, garnering further attention in the art world. However, his Paradise under the Sea, which he submitted with great confidence to the Tokyo Industrial Exhibition in 1907, received only the third prize, to his great disappointment. That August, at the death of his father in Kurume, he returned to his old home. His dream of returning to the center of the art world never realized, he roamed throughout Kyushu before his death from tuberculosis. Aoki’s career, brief as it was, placed him at the pinnacle of Meiji romanticism in painting.
Paul CÉZANNE《Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir》c. 1904-06 Oil on canvas
Cézanne sought to go beyond the Impressionist effort to capture on canvas the glowing moment seen with one’s eyes and to create paintings with an enduring sense of volume, an eternal tenacity. Achieving those contradictory qualities within the same painting was extremely difficult and required much trial and error. To realize his goal, Cézanne chose to distance himself from his Impressionist fellows and follow his own solitary path. He hoped to achieve his objectives by repeatedly painting several set subjects. In the latter half of the 1880s, he produced a series of paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a limestone mountain east of Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, where he was born. With this image. he succeeded at last in adding a sense of energy and resonance to the forceful picture plane, supported by vivid colors, in a work of great refinement. This painting is the culmination of his experiments. In the foreground is a dense growth of trees. Several brushstrokes form a single block of color, carving out a rhythm and creating a sense of depth in the picture plane. The yellow building, the Chateau Noir, is the only geometric shape in this painting; placed in the center, it pulls the composition together. By painting the same subject repeatedly, Cézanne was able to retain the sense of immediacy of the scene as he had perceived it while achieving paintings with a structural quality. His revolutionary work quickly had a decisive influence on twentieth-century art, including Cubism, Fauvism, and Abstraction.
- FUJISHIMA Takeji《Black Fan》1908-09 Oil on canvas (Important Cultural Property)
- SAKAMOTO Hanjiro《Three Grazing Horses》1932 Oil on canvas
- Édouard MANET《Masked Ball at the Opera》1873 Oil on canvas
- Berthe MORISOT《Woman and Child on the Balcony》1872 Oil on canvas
- Wassily KANDINSKY《Self-Illuminating》1924 Oil on canvas
- Georgia O'KEEFFE《Autumn Leaf II》1927 Oil on canvas
- Egypt, Ancient Thebes, Luxor《Statue of Goddess Sekhmet》c. 1390-1352 B.C. Granodiorite or granite
- SESSHU《Landscape of the Four Seasons》Muromachi period, 15th century Sumi and light color on silk (Important Cultural Property)