The Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art originally opened in 1933 as the Kyoto Enthronement Memorial Museum of Art. In 2019, it marked 86 years as a leading Japanese public art museum. The inaugural exhibition commemorating the opening of the renovated Museum in 2020 is a comprehensive survey of Kyoto Art. It presents an unprecedented number of masterpieces from the Museum collection and from a number of other collections in Japan.
The exhibition features over 400 masterpieces culled from 250 years of Kyoto Art. It will be presented in three segments starting with the flourishing of Kyoto Art in the late Edo Period, predating the Meiji Restoration (1868) by 100 years, with works by artists such as Ito Jakuchu, Yosa Buson, Ike no Taiga, Soga Shohaku, Maruyama Okyo, Matsumura Goshun, and Nagasawa Rosetsu. The second segment highlights artists such as Takeuchi Seiho, Uemura Shoen, Tsuchida Bakusen, and Murakami Kagaku, all of whom enriched the Kyoto art scene in pace with Tokyo from the Meiji (1868–1912) through the Showa (1926–1989) periods. Finally, representative post-war and contemporary nihonga (Japanese-style painting) painters, innovators who carried on traditions, including Ono Chikkyo, Fukuda Heihachiro, Domoto Insho, and Ikeda Yoson are introduced, along with craftsmen from the same time, Western-style painters and sculptors from Meiji to the present, and contemporary artists.