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Exhibition in Bonn
Japan's Love for Impressionism From Monet to Renoir

"A unique presentation of outstanding French art
which we are able to show collectively for the first time in Europe."
Rein Wolfs, Director of the Bundeskunsthalle

The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (Germany) presents for the first time in Europe, from 8 October 2015 to 21 February 2016, an important Japonese collection of early Modernism paintings. After the love of the West in the late nineteenth century for Japanese woodcuts, collectors and businessmen like Kojiro Matsukata (1865-1950) and Magosaburô Ohara (1880-1943) began to acquire, more than a century ago, some of the most remarkable Impressionist collections in the world. Both acquired paintings by Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Cézanne and Bonnard among others, and four major works by George Desvallières. As vice president of the Salon d'Automne, the latter also showed an interest in the art of the Land of the Rising Sun by hosting a Salon for the first time in France, in November 1905, the exhibition Peasants and landscapes of Japan.
The painter Torajiro Kojima (1881-1929), who studied art in Paris and Brussels in the early twentieth century acquired in 1920 for Magosaburô Ohara, the painting Choses vues, souvenirs de Londres (1903), exhibited currently in Bonn under the title Music Hall, and Christ et Madeleine (1905). In 1921, Le Bon Larron, Kyrie Eleïson (1913), was added to Magosaburô Ohara's collection. The three works are kept at the Ohara Musueum of Art, Kurashiki (Japan).
Kojiro Matsukata, as for him, had already acquired La Visitation (1913), which now belongs to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

Photo: David Ertl, 2015, © Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH