Yokohama Museum of Art Collection  February 15 - May 24, 2020
Western Art from Yokohama Museum of Art Collection
From Woodcut Illustration to Boltanski—Painting, Print, Photography, Sculpture 

This exhibition focuses on works by European and American artists in the Yokohama Museum of Art collection. Paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures will be presented in art historical order. It is the Museum's first exhibition based exclusively on our inventory of Western Art.

Works by Western artists in the Museum collection number around 1000, including oil paintings, watercolors, prints and sculptures. The collection is distinguished by Surrealist paintings such as Salvador Dali's "Geodesical Portrait of Gala" and Rene Magritte's "The Museum of the King," Dada and Constructivist works by artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin who overturned traditional concepts of art in the first half of the 20th century, as well as examples of French modern art such as Paul Cézanne's "Mont Saint-Victoire Seen from Gardanne," Pablo Picasso's "Sleeping Woman in an Armchair," and Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space."

This exhibition also offers an opportunity to view rarely displayed 16th to the 19th century prints from the former collection of author, mountaineer, and Yokohama resident Kojima Usui. "Crucifixion with Longinus," a woodcut by Urs Graf is a leaf from Matthias Ringmann's "Passion" (1506 Strasburg, 1st edition). It exemplifies early illustrated books, produced from around 1470, printed by combining movable type text with woodcut illustrations. The leaves from "The Museum Claudes" album (published around 1840), based on the etcher's exquisite interpretation of numerous sketches by brilliant 17th century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, employ elaborate aquatint technique and reveal a high standard of manual reproduction art prior to the advent of photography. The former Kojima collection also includes prints by Barbizon artists Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, Impressionists Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse-pioneers of 20th century Cubism and Fauvism.

The development of photomechanical processes eliminated the need for manual work in reproduction of artworks. This allowed for the mass reproduction of masterpieces and greatly changed the way art would be appreciated. At the same time, the widespread prevalence of photographs awakened artist interest in etching and woodcut media to produce multiple autograph originals. At the beginning of the 20th century, photography had a great influence on artistic expression. Dada, Constructivist, and Surrealist artists either incorporated photographs into their paintings and three dimensional works or created fully photographic works. Contemporary artist Christian Boltanski used graduation photographs of Jewish students in Vienna who likely became victims of the Holocaust as an important element in his work to provoke viewers to contemplate mortality.

Featuring around 260 artworks (paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures) from the Yokohama Museum of Art collection built up over a period of more than 30 years, this exhibition traces 500 years of Western art history from woodcut illustrations through to the contemporary art of Christian Boltanski. It invites reflection on the rich relationship between manual and mechanical processes of art.