A large-scale exhibition of 250 works, from Japan and abroad, presenting the Genesis and Evolution of Abstraction.
95 works newly added to the Artizon Museum collection on view, all at once!

From the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I, France enjoyed its Belle Époque, a time of peace and prosperity. In a society brimming with a lively, free atmosphere that spurred artistic creativity, Fauvism, Cubism, and other new art forms bloomed in France at the beginning of the century. In time, those developments led to the birth of abstract painting, one of the outcomes of stylistic evolution in painting. Then abstraction shaped twentieth-century art world. This exhibition explores the history of abstract painting, and its ties to the future. Beginning around the time of abstract painting’s birth, it presents abstraction’s rise, trends flourishing, mainly in French painting before and after the war, and the rise of Hot Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism in France after the war. It also explores abstract art’s simultaneous emergence in Japan, with the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), Gutai, and other movements, its multifaceted development, and its connections with the next generation.

The exhibits include about 150 works from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection, 95 of which are recent acquisitions. * They also include around 100 works on loan from private collections and museums both inside and outside Japan. The approximately 250 works on display will fill all of the Artizon Museum’s galleries.

* Recent acquisitions are works added to the collection since 2015, when the Artizon Museum’s predecessor, the Bridgestone Museum of Art, was closed for renovation.