The Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka is presenting the "NHK Sunday Museum 50th Anniversary Exhibition", which opened on October 10 and runs until December 20, 2026. The show, on the museum's fifth floor, marks half a century of "Nichiyō Bijutsukan" (Sunday Museum), the NHK art programme that began broadcasting in 1976 and which the museum describes as one of the longest-running art programmes on television anywhere.
The exhibition sets out to bring the world of the programme into the gallery. It gathers more than 140 works by about 60 artists, all chosen from those featured in past broadcasts, and shows them alongside footage from the programme, including words spoken by its guests and rarely seen recordings. The selection ranges from Jōmon pottery and crafts to contemporary art and is arranged in five chapters: timeless art and the words that convey it; Japanese beauty from antiquity to the Meiji era; craft between tradition and innovation; disaster and beauty; and the lives and studios of artists. Some works are shown only in Osaka.
Among the works highlighted by the museum are Itō Jakuchū's pair of screens "Stone Lanterns", lent by the Kyoto National Museum; Takahashi Yuichi's "Beauty (Courtesan)" of 1872, an Important Cultural Property from Tokyo University of the Arts; Middle Jōmon flame-type pottery from the Iwanohara site in Niigata; Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon" from the Yokohama Museum of Art; and Ishida Tetsuya's "A Man Who has Lost the Ability to Fly" (1996) from the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art. Contemporary works include pieces by Kōnoike Tomoko, Shimura Fukumi, Shiomi Ryōsuke, Funakoshi Katsura and Ishiuchi Miyako's photograph "hiroshima #9 donor: Ogawa, R." (2007).
Loans come from museums across Japan. The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo has announced that prints from its collection, including works by Alfred Rethel and Matthias Gerung, are among them.
The exhibition is organised by the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka with NHK Osaka Station and NHK Enterprises' Osaka branch, with planning cooperation from NHK Educational Corporation.
