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Past Special Exhibition 2004

Okumura Togyu & the Japanese Painters of the Tsubakikai

30 September (Thu) to 23 December (Thu), 2004

This exhibition featured the work of Okumura Togyu, one of the most representative Japanese-style painters of the twentieth century, along with pieces by members of the Shiseido-sponsored third Tsubakikai exhibition.
The Tsubakikai exhibition is an artists exhibition group initiated by Shiseido in 1947 with the aim of supporting artistic culture. The third Tsubakikai exhibition ran from 1974 to 1990, exhibiting works of Japanese-style painting, Western-style painting, and sculpture. This exhibition displayed thirty of these works, including seven by Okumura Togyu and others by nine artists particularly in line with the Shiseido style, including Iwahashi Eien, Uemura Shoko, Takayama Tatsuo, Yamamoto Kyujin, Ono Chikkyo, Okuda Genso, Hieda Kazuho, Komatsu Hitoshi, and Yoshida Yoshihiko.
This exhibition showed the works of the Japanese-style painters who took the stage with the third Tsubakikai exhibition, giving a full sense of a particular period in post-war Japanese-style painting.

Flower & Plant Designs — Works from the Exhibition of Modern Industrial Arts: Pottery, Lacquer, Metal & Glass

18 June (Fri) to 26 September (Sun), 2004

Plants and flowers have long been a perennial subject in arts and crafts in many parts of the world. In Japan in particular, with its verdant nature and four distinct seasons, such botanical and floral designs have been used not only as expressions of shape and beauty, but also to symbolize the ever-changing seasonal cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. To the Japanese as a people, flowers and plants are familiar parts of everyday experience, but they also have always been close to the human heart, their forms inspiring a wish that they might remain unchanged forever.
This exhibition included thirty-two works from the Shiseido Art House collection, all decorated with botanical or floral designs. The ten craftsmen featured included potters Tamura Koichi, Imaizumi Imaemon XIII, Fujimoto Yoshimichi and Matsui Kosei, lacquer crafters Taguchi Yoshikuni, Masumura Mashiki and Isoi Masami, metal workers Naito Shiro and Somekawa Tetsunosuke, and glass worker Iwata Hisatoshi. Eight of these have been honored with “living national treasure” status by the government of Japan. By displaying contemporary works such as these, underpinned by such long traditions, this exhibition offered an excellent opportunity to glimpse the Japanese sense of the natural world.

Copperplate Prints by Komai Tetsuro — Works from the Fukuhara Collection

12 May (Wed) to 13 June (Sun), 2004

This exhibition featured prints by Komai Tetsuro, one of the pioneers of copperplate printing in Japan and known for his distinct poetic sentiment. Komai Tetsuro was born in Nihombashi, Tokyo and began making his first copperplate prints while still in his teens. He studied oil painting at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts), but after graduating his passion turned more toward researching and creating copperplate prints. His work in this field soon made an impression, both in Japan and abroad, for example earning him an award in the 1951 Sao Paolo Biennale. His pictures are shot through with a deeply solitary reflective spirit combined with rich imagination, and through his body of work he left a significant mark on the post-war art world.
This exhibition showed fifty-six works by Komai, spanning his entire career, collected over the course of forty years by Shiseido honorary chairman Fukuhara Yoshiharu, along with the illustrated poetry collection "Calendrier".

Shiseido Art House 25th Anniversary Exhibition
— Works from the Collection: Paintings, Sculptures & Applied Arts

9 January (Fri) to 5 May (Wed), 2004
Part I: 9 January (Fri) to 7 March (Sun)
Part II: 11 March (Thu) to 5 May (Wed)

This special exhibition commemorated the opening of the Shiseido Art House in 1978 with a selection of the finest works from the collection it has built over long years. Most of these works were originally shown in the Tsubakikai exhibitions held since 1947 at the Shiseido Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, or as part of the Exhibition of Modern Industrial Art series that ran from 1975 to 1995. About fifty-five Japanese artists and craftsmen were represented, spanning a diversity of mediums including Japanese- and Western–style painting, representational sculpture, applied industrial arts and crafts, and both two- and three–dimensional contemporary art.