A 19th-century French master’s first long-awaited retrospective exhibition in Japan

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a well-known 19th-century French mural painter, worked on numerous monumental murals in major buildings in France, while also displaying his talents in easel painting and creating many masterpieces.
His soft-colored works, suggestive of Italian frescoes, make us think of Arcadia, admired as a Utopia from ancient times; his works evoke a refined, tranquil atmosphere. Depicting a profound, allegoric world, his oeuvre is known as a pioneering body of Symbolist works.
Chavannes’s novel art, which he developed while preserving the classical style, had great influence on the artists of the new generation, and also deeply contributed to the development of modern Western-style painting in Japan. This exhibition can be seen as the first invaluable opportunity to properly introduce this great artist to Japan.

Admission Fee
Adults: ¥1,400 (¥1,200)
College & high school students: ¥1,000 (¥800)
Junior high & elementary school students: ¥700 (¥500)
Discounts available for groups of 20 or more, as shown in parentheses.
* Students must present their ID when purchasing student tickets (excluding elementary school students).

The most beautiful residential museum in Europe

The Museo Poldi Pezzoli was originally the residence of the prominent Milanese nobleman Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli. It is open to the public and is one of the most significant art museums in Italy.
This is the first exhibition in Japan to show the pold, Pezzoli family’s outstanding collection of art  works and ornamental pieces; the exhibits have been collected and handed down over many generations.
In this exhibition of numerous fine articles, including the masterpiece “Portrait of a Woman” by Piero del Pollaiolo, a important painter of the early Renaissance, we will trace the development of European art from the Renaissance to the 19th century and exhibit some aspects of a magnificent aristocratic culture.

A Retrospective exhibition of a remarkable 20th-century French colorist painter

Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) is an artist well-known for his characteristic style of swinging line-drawing on bright base colors. He is popular also here in Japan. Since 1920, his style blossomed in paintings of the dazzling sunlight and liberated atmosphere of the Mediterranean; he also created works of orchestras playing and resort landscapes.
This exhibition is a retrospective displaying his works from 1899, the year he left Le Havre and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, to his later years. His development of style can be verified through tracing events such as his encounter with Fauvism, painting in L’Estaque with Georges Braque, creating woodblock prints for Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus, textile designing in collaboration with Paul Poiret, etc. Moving beyond his play of colors and light, this careful tracing of his formative development reveals the essentials of Dufy as an artist.

In the history of art, the genre of “Trompe l'oeil,” with devices that play tricks on the spectators’ eyes, is a well-established feature. This exhibition is the sequel to the Visual Deception exhibition held in 2009, Trick Art Exhibition, which broadly traced the history of the genre. While the previous exhibition emphasized the historical development of the genre of Trompe l'oeil, this time we focus on the evolution of the techniques of illusion in modern art as it branches out into many different streams. We’ve chosen works that are visually interesting as well as excellent in terms of artistry. Also, we divided visual tricks into categories such as “trompe-l’oeil,” “shadows,” “op illusions,” “anamorphosis” and “metamorphosis”; we exhibit new approaches to modern “Trompe l'oeil” along with the achievements of the established masters.

France was at the height of its prosperity before World War I, a time when two completely different styles of art, impressionism and the Ecole de Paris, encountered each other. The common backgrounds shared by these styles lies in the prosperity of contemporary France and the reasonable degree of social stability the country enjoyed. Against this background, artists could strive toward their individual goals while keeping faith with their own sensibility; one could characterize it as the realization of dreams as reality.
This exhibition consists of a Japanese personal collection. As well as being a homage to France from Japan, made through those paintings that are considered the most quintessentially French, this exhibition is also an attempt to revive the dreams of each of the painters who created the works on display.