Past Special Exhibition 2007

Takayama Tatsuo Exhibition

28 September (Fri) to 25 November (Sun), 2007

Takayama Tatsuo was born in 1912 in the city of Oita, attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts), and from there embarked upon a singular career as a Japanese-style painter. He was a founding member of the Shiseido-sponsored third Tsubakikai exhibition, and he is known to have exhibited at least fifty-eight works at the Shiseido Gallery over the years.
This exhibition displayed thirty-seven works by Takayama related to the Shiseido Gallery. Such a limited selection could hardly have hoped to address the entire seventy-year span of Takayama's work, but in this age in which undue importance is often attached to mere surface-level things, perhaps they at least gave a sense of the artist's ongoing efforts to strain the boundaries of creativity to elucidate through painting the rhyme and reason underpinning the world, and in that way this small collection did much to convince us of the power of art and its future.

The Forms of Beauty — The Artistry in Everyday Crafts

Part1. 11 May (Fri) to 8 July (Sun), 2007
Part2. 12 July (Thu) to 24 September (Mon), 2007

This exhibition selected works of traditional craft housed in the museum's collection.
Shiseido has spent decades building a collection of artistic works, a great many of them acquired through the exhibitions at the Shiseido Gallery that have played such an important role in the company's support of artistic culture. From 1975 to 1995, the Shiseido Gallery hosted a series called the Exhibition of Modern Industrial Art, in which craftsmen working in various fields of applied arts were requested to create works for display. Of the nineteen craftsmen who participated over these twenty years, twelve would become Order of Culture recipients (“living national treasures”), perhaps the ultimate public recognition of the extremely high quality of their work. This two-part exhibition featured over sixty works by eighteen of the craftsmen who had participated in the Exhibition of Modern Industrial Art, weighted particularly toward those accorded living national treasure status.
Part 1 included potters Kamoda Shoji , Imaizumi Imaemon XIII, Fujimoto Yoshimichi, and Matsui Kosei; metalsmiths Somekawa Tetsunosuke, Naito Shiro, and Nishi Daiyu; and glassworkers Iwata Hisatoshi and Iwata Toshichi. Part 2 included lacquer artists Akaji Yusai, Isoi Masami, Taguchi Yoshikuni, Masumura Mashiki; potters Yagi Kazuo, Shimizu Uichi, Suzuki Osamu, and Tamura Koichi; and bamboo crafter Iizuka Shokansai. Through their work these craftsmen have brought a sense of artistry to our everyday lives by imbuing objects with everyday purposes with aesthetic beauty, and this exhibition served as an excellent opportunity to experience some of these at the pinnacles of their achievement.

Camellia Blossom Exhibition

2 February (Fri) to 6 May (Sun), 2007

The camellia has long been a favorite flowering tree of the Japanese people, mentioned even in the Man'yoshu, and has had a deep relationship to people's lives. The blossoms have been considered auspicious symbols of the New Year and marriage, and have thus been taken up in the various forms throughout the arts.
This exhibition took up items from the Shiseido Art House collection portraying camellia blossoms, including Japanese paintings by artists like Yamaguchi Hoshun and Ito Shinsui, oil paintings by Nakagawa Kazumasa and Hayazhi Takeshi, lacquer and pottery works by Kitamura Shosai and Tamura Koichi, the work titled Hyakuchinzu that details over 100 types of camellia, and numerous others.
The camellia blossom is also the trademark of Shiseido, a nearly inseparable part of the company's identity. This flower, always glorious and blossoming anew each year, very much embodies the Shiseido spirit of seeking unfading beauty.