Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Picture within a Picture, 1929. National Museum of Art, Osaka
The Nagano Prefectural Art Museum will present a survey of Wassily Kandinsky built entirely from works held in Japanese collections, running from November 7 to December 27, 2026, in its Galleries 1 to 3. Titled in English "Composed Vibration: Wassily Kandinsky from the Collections in Japan," the exhibition marks both the 150th anniversary of Nagano Prefecture and the fifth anniversary of the museum's reopening after renovation.
Kandinsky (1866–1944) was born in Russia and spent most of his working life in Germany and France. He is regarded as one of the founders of abstract painting, setting aside the depiction of visible things to work with color and form alone. Central to his thinking was the idea of an "inner sound," which he treated as the essence of art and which drew him to bring painting into dialogue with other art forms.
According to the museum, this is the first attempt to follow his whole career through works held in collections across Japan. It is also the first solo Kandinsky retrospective in the country since 2002, when one was shown in Tokyo, Kyoto and Fukuoka; an earlier one took place in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1987. The Japanese title, which translates as "The World Resounds," borrows a phrase from the artist himself.
The display is arranged in five chapters: his Munich years and the Russian imagery that colored them; the path toward abstraction and the Blue Rider; Kandinsky's reception in Japan; the Bauhaus and geometry; and his last, calmer period in Paris. The museum also draws attention to the romantic streak in his work, tracing how the fairy-tale scenes of his early Russian and German subjects continued to echo as his motifs became abstract.
A further strand, drawing on recent research, looks at how quickly his art and theories reached Japan around the First World War and how they were taken up by Japanese artists and aestheticians. One example on view is an embroidered obi with a rhythmic pattern by the designer Saitō Kazō, dated around 1940 and lent by the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts.
Works illustrated by the museum include "Arrival of the Merchants" (1905) from the Miyagi Museum of Art, "Without Support" (1923) from the Pola Museum of Art, "Floating" (1927) from the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, and "Picture within a Picture" (1929) from the National Museum of Art, Osaka, along with loans from the Artizon Museum, the Ohara Museum of Art and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
The Nagano presentation follows earlier showings of the tour at the Utsunomiya Museum of Art (July 19 – September 3, 2026) and the Miyagi Museum of Art (September 12 – October 28, 2026).
