Spotlight on 1894
The year the Mitsubishi Ichigokan building was completed

The 10^th anniversary of the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum Tokyo (MIMT) culminates in this exhibition focusing on the era of two artists at the core of the MIMT’s collection: Odilon Redon and Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec. In particular the exhibition centers on “1894” the year that the Mitsubishi Ichigokan building was completed as the first office building in the Marunouchi district. That year was also when Redon released his first color works and also coincides with the publication of the print portfolio L’Estampe originale (1893-95) to which Toulouse-Lautrec, Rddon, and Paul Gaugin contributed.

Meanwhile, in Japan, this was also the period when the painter Yamamoto Hosui, who studied in France under the same teacher as Redon, produced his magnum opus “Urashima”. The exhibition also examines the connections between Japanese Western-style painters and European art history. Planned in coordination with the Museum of Fine Arts Gifu, which prides itself in its world-leading collection of Redon’s works by Redon and his contemporaries, the exhibition features items from that collection. These are mainly priceless charcoal drawings and pastels by Redon as well as multicolored woodblock prints by Gaugin along with works by Yamamoto Hosui and other luminaries of Japanese Western-style painting from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In total, the exhibition comprises over 140 artworks from collections in Japan and overseas. (Some of those on display are changed between the two phases of the exhibition.)