Kojiro Matsukata and the Story of the Collection
Unknown photographer · Early twentieth century photograph; collection assembled 1916 to 1927
Almost everything with the credit line Matsukata Collection on the labels around you owes its presence in Tokyo to one man. Kojiro Matsukata was the son of a prime minister, a graduate of Yale and the president of Kawasaki Dockyard in Kobe, and during the shipbuilding boom of the First World War he became enormously rich. From about 1916 he began buying European art in London and Paris on an astonishing scale, with the stated aim of building a museum in Tokyo where Japanese people who could not travel could see real Western paintings. He called the planned museum the Kyoraku Bijutsukan, the Pavilion of Shared Pleasure.
He bought thousands of works: Rodin bronzes, direct from the Musee Rodin; Monets, direct from the artist at Giverny; Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Courbet, Pissarro and a great many now forgotten academic painters. He also bought back some eight thousand Japanese woodblock prints from the Paris collector Henri Vever, which are now in the Tokyo National Museum. Then everything went wrong. The postwar slump ruined Kawasaki, and Matsukata's collection was scattered. The works stored in London burned in a warehouse fire in 1939, those in Japan were sold to pay debts, and the four hundred or so left in Paris were seized by the French state in 1944 as enemy property.
After the peace treaty of 1951 Japan asked for them back, and France agreed to return most of them as a gift on condition that Japan build a museum to house them. Matsukata died in 1950 and never saw the result. The National Museum of Western Art opened in 1959 with his paintings on the walls and his Rodins in the garden, which is why a museum of Western art in Ueno begins with the Impressionists and a shipbuilder from Kobe.
Did You Know? France kept a handful of the finest works for itself, including Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles, which hangs in the Musee d'Orsay to this day.
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