The was an

art museum An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership and may be accessible to all or have restrictions in place. Although primarily con ...

Nagoya is the largest city in the Chūbu region, the fourth-most populous city and third most populous urban area in Japan, with a population of 2.3million in 2020. Located on the Pacific coast in central Honshu, it is the capital and the most po ...

, Japan, that operated from 1999 to 2018.

History

A sister institution of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (the MFA), the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts was established in partnership with the Foundation for the Arts, Nagoya (FAN) to bring treasures from the MFA's collection to Japan. There was also an economic impetus for the partnership: the MFA, under intense budget pressure at the time, agreed to send art from its permanent collection in exchange for $50 million to be paid over a 20-year period. Under the agreement, the MFA was to send two five-month loan exhibitions to the Nagoya museum each year; longer-term, five-year exhibits were also planned. Works from the MFA's highly respected Department of Asian Art were to be displayed in a "Japanese corner." After years of planning, the museum formally opened on April 17, 1999, in a three-level, 4,700 square meter (50,590 square foot) space that was attached to a 31-story hotel adjacent to Nagoya's Kanayama Station. The inaugural show, a survey of

Barbizon School The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name ...

, Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings that included 62 works by such artists as

Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...

Gauguin Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (, ; ; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of colour and Synthetist style that were distinct fr ...

and

Van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inc ...

, was a hit, drawing 9,000 visitors its first weekend and nearly 450,000 over its four-and-a-half-month run. "This is a model for the entire world to look at and admire," MFA director Malcolm Rogers declared at the opening ceremony. The museum's opening show was followed by similarly crowd-pleasing exhibitions featuring works by

Corot CoRoT (French: ; English: Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) was a space telescope mission which operated from 2006 to 2013. The mission's two objectives were to search for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, particularly th ...

, Millet,

Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir (; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Re ...

, Gauguin and other 19th-century French painters. Many other offerings were considerably less popular, however. A show of American landscape paintings reportedly drew only 10,000 visitors in its first two months. Within four years of its opening, the museum had accumulated a deficit of nearly $35 million. Rogers and the MFA drew extensive criticism for curatorial choices the Boston museum imposed and for what

Sebastian Smee Sebastian Smee is an Australian-born Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for the ''Washington Post''. Education and career Educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide, Smee graduated from the University of Sydney with an Honours degree in fine arts ...

of the ''

Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

'' called "a missing sense of conviction about its purpose." The Nagoya museum did not have its own curators planning exhibitions for Japanese audiences, the ''Globe'' reported; it was reliant on what the MFA chose to send its way. Vishakha Desai, a former MFA curator who subsequently became president of the Asia Society in New York, described the project as "a deal made for money. The idea was, 'You pay the money and you can get what we have.' The strategy was almost — and I hate to use the word — neocolonial." Although the museum had been planned as a 20-year joint venture with expectations that it would be renewed, low visitor numbers led to its closure in October 2018, several months ahead of its planned initial run. Its final exhibition, "In Pursuit of Happiness: Favorite Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston," was held from July 24 to October 8 of that year.

References

External links

Nagoya/Boston MFA website
from the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', April 18, 1999 {{DEFAULTSORT:Nagoya Boston Museum of Fine Arts Art museums established in 1999 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Art museums and galleries in Nagoya 1999 establishments in Japan

History

See also

References

External links