"Masterpieces Collection" Exhibition

Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum

This event has ended.

The Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum makes use of the building constructed by Osaka merchant Shoutaro Kaga (1988-1954) but more than just a building, the collection of works from the 1920s and 1930s form a central part of the Villa, something on which this exhibition is focussing.
The Taisho to the early Showa periods are steeped in the atmosphere of political, economic and cultural Taisho Democracy, the decade just before the Second World War started when freedom reigned supreme. While it was being influenced by Western culture, Japan was herself grasping anew a social independence, so that it can surely be called the period of cultural maturing. During this time numerous personal residences were churned out by the aesthetes of the age, all unanimously building Western-style villas. As one such person, Shoutaro Kaga is known. He held joint tastes for the Oriental and the Occidental, designing the plans for the Oyamazaki Villa himself and seeing it through to completion by 1932. And accordingly the research he began in the pre-war days on western orchids, along with the results of the cultivations, he cumulated into his "Orchids Lines" illustrations book.
In the same period there was the Mingei Movement that set out to reconsider the rapidly disappearing artisan traditions. It was began by Soetsu Yanagi, Shouji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawaii, but it would become well known as a large crafts campaign.
Further, Impressionist Claude Monet and painters like Georges Rouault, praised by the folk craftsmen and the Shirakabaha group, are also part of the large gathering of cultural figures. And in Germany, the comprehensive Bauhaus art school, founded by architect Walter Adolph Georg Gropius, offered teachings by artisans and artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
This exhibition will showcase the collection of the Oyamazaki Villa, a collection packed with representative and important contemporary works from that period.

Gallery Tour: June 1st (Sun), June 22nd (Sun) 14:00-
Capacity: 20 people
Free

[Image: Claude Monet "Water-Lily" ]