Boston MFA Opens Nagoya Outpost - Boston Museum of Fine Arts opens branch in Japan

Art in America, June, 1999 by Lee Rosenbaum

Attracting over 9,200 visitors during its Apr. 17-18 opening, the Nagoya/ Boston Museum of Fine Arts could be the first in a series of international satellites launched by Boston's expansionist director, Malcolm Rogers. "It is inevitable that we will look at other opportunities around the world," declared Rogers, who frequently expresses his desire to "internationalize" the BMFA. At this writing, he is also contemplating major building plans at home to increase exhibition space, enhance climate control and improve research and conservation facilities.

One of the few museums in the U.S. possessing a sufficiently large collection to contemplate multiple outposts, Boston is to receive nearly $50 million from public and private sources in Japan, a deal that began with the 1991 signing of a letter of intent and continues through a 20-year exhibition schedule ending in 2019 [see "Front Page," Feb. '96, Feb. '93 and Jan. '92]. The outpost's $13.5-million annual operating budget will be paid with additional Japanese funds. This arrangement, Rogers believes, may prove to be a "powerful model" for other financially strapped, art-rich museums.

When the letter of intent was signed, Boston was desperately seeking solutions to budgetary problems that have now eased thanks to rigorous cost-cutting and aggressive fund-raising, and Nagoya was riding the crest of the Japanese economy, which subsequently went into free-fall. Even Kiichiro Ito, chairman of Nagoya's Foundation for the Arts, which funds and manages the new museum, conceded to Art in America that the project probably would not have gotten sufficient support if it had been conceived today. He added, though, that Japan's current financial plight has not affected the museum.

The $38.5-million, three-story museum is part of a $197.5-million 31-story mixed-use facility, the Kanayama Minami Building, designed by Yoshinobu Sato with the Nikken Sekkei architectural firm. The office tower contains a luxury hotel and the Nagoya Center for Urban Advancement. Unlike Frank Gehry's flamboyant titanium Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the BMFA's dignified granite structure is "a polite building that fits into its civic context," Rogers observed. "I'm pleased that the museum is about the collection and not about the building." Construction was funded through the Nagoya City Urban Development Company, whose principal lender is the financially troubled Nagoya-based Tokai Bank, of which Ito is senior adviser and former president and chairman. His Foundation for the Arts has raised some $68 million from the city of Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture and business sources. Income from this endowment (plus a limited amount of principal, if needed) will support the museum.

The museum contains some 15,070 square feet of gallery space, slightly more than the space occupied by the recent "Monet in the 20th Century" show in Boston and a small fraction of the 112,000 square feet of Bilbao's galleries. Unlike Bilbao, Nagoya will not build a collection of its own and won't serve as a venue for its parent museum's blockbuster loan shows, but only for works from the permanent collection. Although Rogers declined to predict attendance, Ito said he hoped for 600,000 visitors during the first year, compared to Bilbao's first-year attendance of 1.36 million, and Boston's 1.28 million for fiscal 1998.

Economic considerations aside, it is still an open question whether both sides have struck a good deal in terms of their programmatic and institutional goals. During the prolonged, difficult negotiations for the project, Nagoya's representatives made no secret of their desire for a steady influx of works from Boston's fabled Impressionist and Japanese collections. But the Bostonians, wanting to properly represent the breadth of the MFA collection, insisted on sending the whole canon, from Egyptian to American Indian. The compromise: at least eight of the 40 half-year exhibitions during the next 20 years must come from Boston's European paintings department (including but not limited to Impressionists); eight others must come from its rich Asian holdings (including but not limited to Japanese). In addition, a small "Japanese corner" will always display samples from Boston's superb Japanese collection. The first occupant of the corner is a curiously Western example: European King and Members of His Court (1601-14), a six-panel folding screen by an anonymous artist who was strongly influenced by European materials and techniques. "It bridges the East and West," said Rogers, explaining the choice.

The first year's two short-term exhibitions are geared to the Japanese audience and its proven favorites: "Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape," on view to Sept. 26, and "Okakura Tenshin and the MFA," featuring works acquired by one of the museum's early curators of Japanese and Chinese art, Oct. 23, 1999 through March 2000. The title of the first show is perhaps a misnomer: only 17 of the 62 works are by the two named artists and only about half are Impressionist. Two works, a Pissarro and a Monet, are not landscapes but street scenes. Half of the show explores Impressionism's "precursors and aftermath," according to Boston's European paintings curator, George Shackelford. Along with van Gogh, Degas and Cezanne, he has included a liberal sprinkling of such obscure artists as Isabey, Chintreuil and Guigou.