Tokyo.- The National Museum of Western Art is proud to show “Goya: Light and Shade. Masterpieces from the Museo del Prado” on view through January 29th 2012. The Museo del Prado is continuing its rewarding collaboration with Japan in this third exhibition project, the first to be devoted to a single artist. It marks the culmination of a decade of exhibitions co-organised with leading Japanese institutions and made possible through the sponsorship of The Yomiuri Shimbun. Following the two exhibitions entitled Masterpieces from the Museo del Prado held in 2002 and 2006, which comprised rigorous selections of some of the Museum’s masterpieces, this exhibition will be entirely devoted to one of the most important names within the Prado’s collection: Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes.
The Prado has placed great emphasis on the organisation of this exhibition, which will present a sizeable selection of its collection of paintings, drawings and prints by Goya, one of the artists most admired by the Japanese public. The works to be shown have been selected with the intention of offering the visiting public a chronological survey of the work of Goya. Without aiming at being exhaustive, the exhibition will be structured into different sections in the manner of small visual accounts that will analyse the principal themes depicted by the artist during the course of his career. The result will be to present a series of fundamental ideas around which Goya’s artistic, political and social thinking was articulated. The different sections of the exhibition will thus reflect the social reality of Goya’s life, in which monarchs, the social elite, his friends and the working people all played prominent roles. It will also focus on the thematic variety and impressive technique evident throughout Goya’s oeuvre in all the different media in which he worked, as well as the fact that he simultaneously produced official commissions and other works of a freer, more critical nature that were the response to his own expressive needs.
An important aspect of the exhibition is its emphasis on Goya’s astonishing mastery of the different techniques employed in his paintings, drawings and prints, which laid the way for the subsequent liberation achieved by modern art. Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to appreciate technical and conceptual links between Goya and later artists that established a unique path and one that made him ‘the first modern artist’. The exhibition will feature more than 100 works, including 45 prints by Goya from the National Museum of Western Art’s own colleciton as well as 6 from other Japanese institutions: the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum and the Fuji Art Museum, the latter also in Tokyo. The Museo del Prado will be lending around 25 paintings and 46 works on paper.
The National Museum of Western Art was established in April 1959 and was based on the Matsukata Collection focusing on the Impressionist paintings and Auguste Rodin’s sculptures previously stored by the French government. The museum’s purpose is to provide the public with opportunities to appreciate western art. Since its opening, the museum, as Japan’s only national institution devoted to western art, has been involved in exhibitions, art work and document acquisition, research, restoration and conservation, education and the publication of materials related to western art. The museum exhibits works from the Matsukata Collection as well as works created from the Renaissance to the early 20th century that have been acquired since the museum’s opening.
The museum has purchased art work every year since its establishment in its efforts to build and develop its permanent collection. These permanent collection works are displayed in the Main Building (Le Corbusier, 1959) and New Wing (MAEKAWA Kunio, 1979) throughout the year. The museum is involved in the development and organization of a special exhibition every year. These exhibitions feature works on loan from private collections and museums both in and out of Japan. The museum also co-sponsors exhibitions organized jointly with outside organizations, including major newspapers, that are held held twice a year.
Special exhibitions are displayed in the Exhibition Galleries completed in 1997. The museum’s collection features pre-18th century paintings including those by Andreas Ritzos, Joos Van Cleve, Paolo Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, Salomon Van Ruysdael, and Jusepe de Ribera, 19th to early 20th century French paintings including works by Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Gustave Moreau and works by the next generation of artists, such as Albert Marquet, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock. Visit the museum’s website at … http://collection.nmwa.go.jp