Image: National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo has announced ‘Tate Museum Turner Exhibition: Painting the Sublime, in Dialogue with Contemporary Art,’ a major Turner retrospective scheduled for 24 October 2026 to 21 February 2027. The museum’s announcement says the exhibition will open this autumn and that a spot video has already been released, alongside an official website for the project.
According to the exhibition site, the Tokyo presentation is part of a touring show and is followed by Osaka Nakanoshima Museum of Art. The Tokyo dates are listed as the first venue in the published event range, with the exhibition remaining on view in Tokyo through late February 2027.
The project is centred on J.M.W. Turner, described on the exhibition site as one of Britain’s greatest painters and a leading figure of Romanticism. The museum text highlights his treatment of light and atmosphere, and his reputation for evoking the sublime in nature. Turner, born in 1775 and active until 1851, is also presented as an artist whose experimental approach to landscape painting helped alter the course of the genre.
The exhibition will draw on the Tate collection in London, which the site describes as the world’s largest collection of Turner works. More than 80 oils, watercolours and related works will be shown, making this a large-scale retrospective based on Tate holdings.
Rather than arranging the material in a strict chronology, the organisers say the exhibition will reorganise Turner’s works by theme while following a loose timeline. This structure is intended to foreground recurring concerns in Turner’s practice, including changing light, air and the visual conditions of the natural world.
A notable feature of the project is its pairing of Turner’s paintings with contemporary art. The exhibition site says the works will be placed in dialogue with modern and contemporary artists, reflecting how Turner’s questions continue to resonate beyond his own period. The museum frames this as a way of tracing the reach of his ideas into later artistic practice.
The exhibition website also includes examples of works due to appear, including ‘The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, 1838’ and ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps’. The Tokyo dates remain the key published schedule for the first venue: 24 October 2026 to 21 February 2027 at the National Museum of Western Art.
