The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo will open “Tate Turner: Sublime Painting, Dialogue with Contemporary Art” on Saturday 24 October 2026. Organized with Tate, the Asahi Shimbun and TV Asahi, the exhibition runs until 21 February 2027 and brings more than 80 oil paintings and watercolors by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) from Tate’s collection to Japan.
The museum’s announcement presents Turner as a painter of constantly changing light and atmosphere, of violent seas and skies, and of a world in perpetual motion. The exhibition is arranged by theme, following his career in loose chronological order, and takes as its organizing idea the sublime, a concept discussed by 18th-century philosophers. According to the museum, Turner’s work has long been seen as an embodiment of that idea, which became one of the keys to later discussions of Romantic art.
Works illustrated by the museum include “Avalanche in the Grisons”, exhibited in 1810, “Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!”, exhibited in 1846, and “Rough Sea with Dolphins”, painted around 1835–40, the first and last of them oil on canvas from Tate.
Throughout the show, Turner’s paintings are set alongside post-war and contemporary art. Among the recent works are Olafur Eliasson’s photographic series “The glacier melt series 1999/2019”, a set of 30 C-prints, and “Hydra Decapita” (2010), a work by The Otolith Group.
The programme includes an opening-day lecture on 24 October, slide talks in November, December and February, and online lectures in December and January. The museum is open from 9:30 to 17:30, with evening opening until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays, and is closed on most Mondays. General admission is ¥2,400.
After its run at the museum’s Ueno site, the exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, according to the show’s official website.
