Welcome. Ever since the original building opened its doors in Kamakura in 1951, the museum has focused on thematic exhibitions. There are still no permanent exhibitions at the Kamakura Annex or at the Hayama location. Through our exhibitions we have won the trust of artists, their families, and collectors and assembled a collection of nearly 14,000 works.

Our collection is focused on Japanese contemporary and modern art dating from the closing days of the Edo period through the Showa period. Today I would like to discuss one particular work, Standing Figure by Shunsuke Matsumoto.

Matsumoto painted this picture in the middle of the Second World War. He opposed the idea that painters should cooperate with the war effort and, the year before producing this painting, contributed an essay entitled The Living Artist to the art magazine Mizue. In this masterly self-portrait he depicts himself as a painter resisting the zeitgeist. The structures in the background are the garbage incinerator at Takadanobaba and the transformer station at Mejiro. When he was thirteen, Matsumoto lost his hearing to illness, so he captured this urban landscape in silence. The carefully painted two small dogs add to the quiet appeal of the painting.

Hello. My name is Ayako Imanishi and I am a curator at the Kaburaki Kiyokata Memorial Art Museum.
The museum stands on the site of the former home of Kaburaki Kiyokata, a master of modern Japanese-style painting, and is dedicated to Kiyokata’s work.

Let me introduce you to Cool of the Morning, which is a typical example of Kiyokata’s paintings of beautiful women (bijinga). Here he shows us his eldest daughter amid the natural landscape of Kanazawa, Yokohama, with its extensive paddy fields and lotus flowers glistening with dew on an early summer’s morning.

Yes, you can sense Kiyokata’s paternal love in the innocent gesture of the girl.
To protect the works, we only put each on display once a year for about one month.