Few museums have reshaped their collections over the past decade as dramatically as the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan. Since 2015, the museum has quietly become one of Japan\u2019s most active institutional buyers of international art, acquiring works by Gerhard Richter, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Wolfgang Tillmans at a time when many museums in the country were reducing acquisitions.<\/p>\n
Now, some of those purchases underpin The New Vision: Monet and the Contemporary Gaze<\/a> (until 7 April 2027), an exhibition that places the museum\u2019s 19 Monets\u2014the largest collection of the French painter in Asia\u2014into dialogue with works by more than 20 Modern and contemporary artists, including Gonzalez-Torres, Tillmans, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Fujiko Nakaya and No\u00e9mie Goudal. \u201cThe aim was not simply to arrange Monet\u2019s paintings chronologically,\u201d a museum spokesperson says. \u201cWe wanted contemporary artists to become another set of eyes through which Monet can be reconsidered from the perspective of the 21st\u00a0century.\u201d<\/p>\n The museum\u2019s holdings span almost four decades of Monet\u2019s career, from scenes along the Seine and Saint-Lazare Station in the 1870s to the Normandy coast, the celebrated Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and the London and Venice series, culminating in The Water-Lily Pond (1899) and the late Water Lilies, tracing Monet\u2019s artistic evolution from 1872 to 1908. The show places his paintings alongside artists exploring similar questions of perception, memory and landscape.<\/p>\n Nakaya\u2019s site-specific fog installation transforms dry stream beds in the museum\u2019s woodland into ephemeral rivers, echoing Monet\u2019s creation of the garden at Giverny. Horn\u2019s 1999 Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) revisits the Thames not simply as a landscape but as a repository of memory and history, while Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s candy spill and light installation are paired with Monet\u2019s Sunset on the Seine in Winter (1880), drawing out shared meditations on grief, absence and the passing of time.<\/p>\n Shifting priorities<\/p>\n The exhibition also reflects a broader transformation within the museum. Founded in 2002, the Pola Museum is built on a collection assembled by Tsuneshi Suzuki, the second-generation head of the cosmetics company Pola, who began buying art in 1958. Over four decades he developed one of Japan\u2019s finest collections of Western Modern painting, with Impressionism at its core.<\/p>\n Yet Pola\u2019s collecting story did not end with Impressionism. Since around 2015, the museum has expanded its holdings into contemporary practice. Recent acquisitions include Gerhard Richter\u2019s 1987 painting Abstraktes Bild (649-2), bought at Sotheby\u2019s Hong Kong in 2020 for HK$214.6m ($29.2m), and Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s Untitled (America #3) (1992), acquired at Christie\u2019s New York in 2024 for $13.6m.<\/p>\n Pola\u2019s collecting strategy also mirrors broader shifts in Japanese collecting. Monami Tsukada, the lead researcher and senior art adviser at the Chain Museum<\/a>, says Japan\u2019s enthusiasm for Impressionism dates back to the Meiji era (1868-1912), when Western art became closely associated with modernisation. One of the earliest milestones was the Matsukata Collection, assembled by the industrialist K\u014djir\u014d Matsukata, who visited Monet\u2019s studio at Giverny and acquired thousands of Western works that later formed the foundation of Tokyo\u2019s National Museum of Western Art<\/a>. That enthusiasm intensified during the asset bubble of the late 1980s. In the years leading up to 1990, Japanese collectors and corporations poured billions of dollars into art acquisitions, with Japan accounting for around 30% of global art imports by value.<\/p>\n Cyanne Chutkow, Christie\u2019s deputy chairman of Impressionist and Modern art, describes a shift since the early 1990s, with acquisitions by Japanese institutions increasingly driven by \u201cconnoisseurship, scholarship, collection-building, art-historical significance and long-term cultural value\u201d. She argues that this has created \u201ca more sustainable and intellectually driven collecting environment\u201d, making today\u2019s Japanese market smaller than during the bubble years, but also more mature and discerning.<\/p>\n Pola\u2019s recent acquisitions reflect that evolution. Rather than moving away from Impressionism, the museum has expanded its collection across media and geographies to strengthen its representation of 20th- and 21st-century art, aiming to give visitors a more continuous view of art history. As the museum puts it: \u201cOur goal is not to preserve the collection as a historical legacy. We want it to remain an open resource that can continually be reinterpreted from the perspective of the present.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few museums have reshaped their collections over the past decade as dramatically as the Pola Museum of Art…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,103381,460,134,126814,941,197562],"class_list":["post-910097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-claude-monet","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-impressionism","tag-japan","tag-museum-collections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}