Image: Higashiyama Kaii, Green Echoes, 1982. Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, Higashiyama Kaii Gallery
The Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, will stage "Higashiyama Kaii: A Retrospective" from 9 October to 12 December 2027, marking 120 years since the painter's birth as well as the museum's own fifth anniversary. The exhibition will be shown only in Osaka.
The organisers present it as Osaka's first major Higashiyama exhibition in 45 years, and the first since his death. The previous one was held in 1982 at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, which at the time was still located in Suita, so this will also be the first large-scale showing of his work inside Osaka city itself.
Higashiyama (1908–1999) was born in Yokohama and grew up in Kobe. He studied Japanese-style painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and then spent two years in Germany studying Western art history. His reputation was made by Afterglow, which won a special prize at the Nitten exhibition in 1947, and by The Road (1950), whose spare composition and clear colour anticipated much of his later landscape work. Often described as a national painter of the Japanese landscape, he received the Order of Culture in 1969.
Around 90 works are planned, among them Afterglow, The Road and the blue-dominated Green Echoes (1982). The organisers also intend to include pieces held by private owners and companies that have rarely been seen in public, such as Early Spring at Deerhaven (1963), lent by Kirin Holdings.
A centrepiece will be a near-complete re-creation of the interior of the Mieidō at Tōshōdai-ji, which is normally closed to visitors, allowing Higashiyama's sliding-door paintings to be seen together. He formally accepted the commission in 1971 as a tribute to the Chinese monk Jianzhen, whose statue is enshrined in the hall, and took 11 years from first ideas to completion. The cycle spans five rooms and 68 door panels, depicting Japan's seas and mountains alongside scenes of Jianzhen's native China in both colour and ink.
Visitors will also see the full-size, colour-coded preparatory drawing for Dawn Tide, Higashiyama's mural for the Imperial Palace. Because the finished mural is not normally open to the public, the organisers say this drawing is the only way to experience the work at its actual scale outside the palace.
The exhibition is organised by the museum together with Nikkei Inc., TV Osaka and the Kobe Shimbun, in cooperation with the Higashiyama Kaii Memorial Foundation.
