Matsukata Kōjirō

Matsukata Kōjirō

Matsukata Kōjirō ( Japanese 松 方 幸 次郎 ; * January 17, 1865 ; † June 24, 1950 ) was one of the most important Japanese entrepreneurs in the first half of the 20th century. The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo emerged from his extensive art collection .

family

Matsukata Kōjirō was born as the third son of the future Japanese Prime Minister Matsukata Masayoshi and his wife Matsukata Masako. He was married to Matsukata Yoshiko, the daughter of Kuki Takayoshi, and later adopted his younger brother Matsukata Saburō.

Entrepreneur

At Matsukata Kōjirō's initiative, the companies Kawasaki Kisen , Kawasaki Zosen and Kokusai Kisen were merged , as he realized that a strong Japanese shipping industry was necessary for the economic development of his country. The Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, also called "K" Line after its initials, based in Kobe , developed under his presidency into one of the largest shipping lines in the world and, according to Lloyd's , rose to 13th place in an international comparison. The previous dependency on British and US shipping lines could be lifted by continuously building up our own fleet. Between 1922 and 1924 there were regular ship connections to Europe, Australia, India and the USA. In addition to traffic between foreign countries and Japan, the lucrative Atlantic route between Hamburg and New York also created a division that is independent of the motherland. After a branch was founded in New York in 1921, Kawasaki & Co., Ltd. was founded in 1927 . a subsidiary in London. In addition to the shipping lines, shipbuilding, aircraft construction and oil imports from the Soviet Union also belonged to the divisions of the company headed by Matsukata Kōjirō. Today the Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha is part of the Kawasaki Heavy Industries .

Art collector

Matsukata Kōjirō invested a large part of his fortune in the early 1920s during various trips to Europe in works by Western artists, where he mainly acquired important pieces from his collection from the Paris dealers Georges Bernheim and Paul Durand-Ruel . In addition to handicrafts and sculptures, he also brought together several thousand paintings. In addition to Western art kōjirō matsukata built in Japan is also an important collection of ukiyo-e - woodcuts , which he had but sell them due to financial difficulties in the 1927th Almost 8,000 ukiyo-e woodcuts from the former Matsukata collection are now in the Tokyo National Museum . Matsukata's original idea of ​​later exhibiting the Japanese woodcuts together with the Western works of art in a museum to be founded in Tokyo could not come true.

Today it is not known what the exact size of the collection of Western art was: parts of this collection were for sale, other parts were burned in a warehouse fire in London. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the core of the collection was in Paris and was later confiscated as enemy property by the French government. The collection fell under the provisions of the Peace Treaty of San Francisco and thus came into French state ownership. Important pieces came to French museums, others were sold. As a gesture of reconciliation, France donated 196 paintings, 80 drawings, 26 prints and 63 sculptures from the former Matsukata collection, which form the basis of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, to the Japanese people in the 1950s. The museum, inaugurated in 1959, is located in Ueno Park not far from the Tokyo National Museum, so that in retrospect Matsukata's wish to show Japanese and Western art together has almost been fulfilled.

Claude Monet

Matsukata met Claude Monet personally in 1921 and told him that young artists in Japan were studying his paintings on the basis of photographs and that they felt the need to see these pictures in the original. Monet was very impressed by this, as he again saw Japanese art as one of his inspirations. Monet, who normally only received family members and close friends in his studio, invited Matsukata to Giverny , showed him his pictures there and asked him to make a selection. On this first visit he bought 16 of his works alone and on another visit five months later he was able to purchase another 18 pictures. Until Monet's death in 1926, the two remained on friendly terms.

The Western Art Collection

The focus of the Matsukata collection of Western art was on paintings by the French Impressionists . The most important paintings included Édouard Manet's Boy in the Flowers and Monsieur Brun , Pierre-Auguste Renoir's In the Forest and Parisian Woman in Algerian Costume, and Camille Pissarro's Winter Landscape , Entertainment and Harvest . In addition to a whole group of works by Claude Monet, he also owned important works of late impressionism . These included a rose still life by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin 's works Bathing Women and Two Breton Girls on the Beach . Other well-known artists in his collection were Eugène Boudin , Albert Marquet , Kees van Dongen , Gustave Moreau , Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran , Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , Henri Fantin-Latour , Maurice Denis , François Bonvin , Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet . In addition, Matsukata brought together an extensive group of sculptures by Auguste Rodin . This includes such well-known works as The Thinker , The Citizens of Calais and The Gate of Hell . All of these works can be seen today at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. One of the paintings owned by the French state is Edouard Manet's beer waitress , which ended up in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay . An example of the works sold by France after World War II is Claude Monet's painting Weeping Willow , now owned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

• 

  Camille Pissarro:
  Winter Landscape
  (today Tokyo)

• 

  Édouard Manet:
  The Beer Waitress
  (now Paris)

• 

  Claude Monet:
  Weeping Willow
  (now Fort Worth)

• 

  Paul Gauguin: Little Breton Women by the Sea
  (today Tokyo)

literature

• Haru Matsukata Reischauer: Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage. Belknap Press 1988, ISBN 0-674-78801-X
• René Gimpel : Journal d'un collectionneur: marchand de tableaux Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1963

Web links

• Biography of Matsukata Kōjirō (Japanese)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Matsukata is the family name, Kōjirō the first name.