Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Art museum in Okazaki Park, Sakyō-ku, Japan.
Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, known since 2020 as Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, stands in Okazaki Park. Its 1933 main building, designed by Kenjirō Maeda, is Imperial Crown Style: a brick facade with a pale stone upper storey, a dark tiled roof with a central gabled dormer, and a flat entrance canopy on pale square columns. The 2020 renovation by Jun Aoki added a glass-fronted lower level and the Kyocera Square approach.
Planning began in 1928 to mark Emperor Shōwa's enthronement, and the building opened in 1933 as the Grand Ceremony Commemorative Kyoto Art Museum. Its Imperial Crown Style main hall, based on Kenjirō Maeda's winning competition entry and built by the city's civil engineering bureau, is the oldest surviving public art museum building in Japan. Seized by occupying forces after the war, it was returned and renamed Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 1952; a 2020 renewal added Jun Aoki's glass-walled entrance and the Higashiyama Cube.
The collection centres on Japanese-style painting (Nihonga), Western-style painting and crafts made from the Meiji period to around 1990. It holds Takeuchi Seihō's 1913 hanging scroll "Eni naru saisho", a designated Important Cultural Property, plus works by Uemura Shōen, Yasui Sōtarō and Umehara Ryūzaburō. Open-call exhibitions and university graduation shows are still held here, as they have been since the building opened as a rental venue for such shows.
The museum is a 10-minute walk from Higashiyama Station on the Tozai subway line; buses 5 and 46 stop at Okazaki Koen / Bijutsukan, Heian Jingu-mae. The entrance is on the lower level, reached by a ramp from Kyocera Square. The south courtyard, now called Ten no Niwa, is open to visitors.
The 50-year naming deal with Kyocera, signed in 2016, is worth 5 billion yen and covered roughly half the cost of the 2018–2020 renovation. The museum's director is architect Jun Aoki, whose firm designed that renewal; the building won a 2020 Good Design Award.
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