It was Paul Gauguin who led me to the Artizon Museum, an extraordinary art museum in Tokyo. Paintings on loan from this museum in the National Gallery of Australia’s 2024 exhibition Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, principally sponsored by Mazda Australia, grabbed my attention and on looking it up, I certainly wanted to visit.    

The Artizon Museum is the successor of the Bridgestone Museum of Art, with a wonderful story beginning with its establishment by Ishibashi Shojiro, founder of the Bridgestone Tyre Co., Ltd., now the Bridgestone Corporation.

In Tokyo recently, I met with Mr Ishibashi Hiroshi, who is Shojiro’s grandson as well as the Director of the Museum and the President of the Ishibashi Foundation that operates the Museum. We talked about aspects of that story which shed light on what makes the Museum so contemporary, international and appealing to visit today.   

But first, for some context: it’s located near Tokyo station in the 23-story Museum Tower Kyobashi, completed in 2019. This arose on the site of the former Bridgestone Building, which had opened in 1952 with the all-new Bridgestone Museum of Art on its second floor.

The Artizon Museum opened in 2020. Its public areas extend over levels one to six of the Tower, with over 2000 square metres of exhibition space, a café, shop, lecture room and information room, and state-of-the-art equipment throughout. These purpose-built spaces of glass, metal, stone and engineered materials have won architecture and interior design awards, and that’s no surprise; they create a spectacular and inspiring setting in which to view art.   

And what is the art? Modern (late nineteenth and twentieth century) Japanese Western-style paintings and modern European paintings, especially French Impressionist, form the heart of the collection and they are significant. In particular, the Museum holds Japan’s foremost collection of Impressionist art.

Yet the entire collection is much broader. The around 3000 works of art range in age from ancient Greek and Roman to contemporary, with most created in Japan, Europe or the United States. Some of the Museum’s strongest art collecting themes in recent decades have been Edo-period Japanese art, and Abstraction and its roots, including Cubism. Also, there are precious sub-collections of photographs and film which document artists.

At the Museum, you can learn about the artists and works in the information room and via digital touch screens. Onsite or elsewhere in the world, information is accessible via the Museum’s App and website.

What’s on display varies over time but, on any day, you can expect a richness of art, including work by internationally famous artists. For a taste: Cézanne, Klee, Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Renoir are just some of the well-known modern Western artists from that collection heart, beside the Japanese who include Fujishima Takeji, and also Yasui Sotaro whose work will be highlighted within a collection exhibition, 11 October 2025 – 12 January 2026.  

The art of today is featured principally in the ‘Jam Session’ series. Each year, the Museum invites one or two contemporary artists for a major exhibition of their work, interspersed with a selection from the Museum’s collection. The latest Jam Session, On Physis, presented inventive kinetic artworks by the Japanese artist Mohri Yuko, whose remarkable talents have been increasingly recognised in recent years.

 

MOHRI Yuko, and installation views of Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection X MOHRI Yuko – On Physis, 2 Nov 2024 - 9 Feb 25. Courtesy of Artizon Museum. Photos: kugeyasuhide

 

On Physis, Mohri’s first large-scale solo show in Japan, was already in planning when she was invited to represent Japan in the 2024 Venice Biennale, resulting in her solo show Compose in the Japan Pavilion, incidentally a building that Shojiro funded the construction of in the 1950s. The Artizon Museum’s curators are informed about the contemporary art scene and, more than that, the Museum is part of that scene.

See the Museum’s program to know who’s jamming next and what else is on in 2025, not least Echoes Unveiled: Art by First Nations Women from Australia, 24 June – 21 September. This major exhibition will include works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Nonggirrnga Marawili, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Judy Watson, Yhonnie Scarce, Julie Gough, Maree Clarke, and the Tjanpi Desert Weavers. Some of the works are from the Museum’s collection, while others will be loaned from other institutions or private collections. Australian First Nations art holds a special place at the Museum – it’s the only First Nations art that it currently collects.

Beginnings

When I ask Mr Ishibashi Hiroshi about the origins of the Museum’s international perspective, our conversation turns to his grandfather, Shojiro, 1889–1976, who initially lived in Kurume, northern Kyushu.    

‘The family ran a small tailoring business that included footwear, split-toe socks called tabi,’ says Hiroshi, adding that after Shojiro began to manage this business at the age of seventeen, he made changes. One was to focus on tabi, and another was a new product, on noticing that local mineworkers needed footwear more durable and protective than their usual straw sandals. ‘What he decided to do, was to attach a rubber sole under the tabi and make it into what one calls a jika-tabi, so that you can directly wear it as if it’s a shoe.’

Mr Ishibashi Shojiro and the former Bridgestone Building, completed 1951. Courtesy of Artizon Museum

 

High quality and an affordable price made these jika-tabi greatly popular with mine workers and others, and he progressed to making sneaker-like rubber shoes, before automobile tyres. Hiroshi comments that tyre manufacture is also essentially a process of combining rubber with fabric, and continues, ‘But going from a shoe business to a tyre business, there’s a lot of challenges you need to go through and information that you need to gain.

‘As, at that time in Japan, tyre-making was by companies with foreign ownership, he felt he had to connect with the non-Japanese for information. So, for example, he knew a German expert in rubber technology, so he got connected with that individual. He also looked at a state-of-the-art tyre plant in the United States.

‘So, for his business he valued things that were advanced, cutting edge, but at that time it was essential that he turned to overseas to gain them,’ says Hiroshi. ‘I think that turned into an international perspective that helped him to build this really nice art collection.’

 

Mary CASSATT, The Sun Bath (After the Bath), 1901. Courtesy of Artizon Museum

 

Shojiro launched the first production of tyres in Japan by a wholly owned Japanese company in 1930, in a corner of the Kurume footwear factory. Bridgestone Tyres was founded soon after, in 1931, with its English-language name being an inventive rearrangement of ‘Ishibashi’ which means ‘stone bridge’.

By then, art was already important to Shojiro. He’d begun to collect art in the 1920s to decorate his Western-style home in Kurume and, in 1930, the artist Sakamoto Hanjiro had seeded his dream to create an art museum.

Sakamoto spoke to Shojiro about the paintings of a fellow Western-style artist from Kurume, Aoki Shigeru, who had died young, before he became famous. In Shojiro’s own words, ‘Since it would be a shame if they were scattered and lost, he kindly asked me to gather them up and build a museum for them.’

 

AOKI Shigeru, A Gift of the Sea, 1904. Courtesy of Artizon Museum

 

As Shojiro acquired art by Aoki, Sakamoto and others, the success of Bridgestone helped. It made him wealthy, and once he’d moved his home and business headquarters to Tokyo in the 1930s, he was closer to art experts and dealers in Tokyo. Also, international business trips for Bridgestone, 1950–61, post-WWII years in which the Japanese government didn’t permit its citizens recreational travel overseas, created opportunities to visit museums and galleries across the US and Europe, learning about art and museums and developing friendships in the art world.

Hiroshi says, ‘He felt the need to build a museum from the international perspective as well, so for that reason he was visiting many museums abroad. You can see the impact of this international perspective even in the works that he had collected,’ says Hiroshi, referring to Shojiro as being well aware of the international popularity of French Impressionist paintings in museums and on the market.   

 

Installation view, Looking Human, 2 Nov 2024 - 9 Feb 25. Courtesy of Artizon Museum Photo: KIOKU Keizo.

 

But Shojiro collected Impressionist art not just out of anticipation of its popularity, once in his museum – he greatly appreciated its nature. Shojiro has said, ‘I had been interested in oil paintings by Japanese artists since some thirty years ago, and my reach gradually expanded to European paintings. What I like best are the French Impressionists and I have focused on them and taken great pains to collect them.’    

How Shojiro developed his collection and museum, with a vision of Japanese and Western art displayed side by side, reflected who he was – a man with an international outlook who was, indeed, distinctly Western in his ways in public and at home.

He was also a man who admired newness, and not only in technology. Hiroshi says, ‘I think every time he created something, he wanted it to be new in the sense of the concept being new. Otherwise, he will not be satisfied. So, for example, when he built his house, he brought in an architect who had just studied in the United States.’ This was Matsuda Gunpei, working with Hirata Shigeo to design Shojiro’s 1930s Art-Deco house in Azabu-Nagasaka-cho, Tokyo.

‘He valued things that were new in concept also for the museum,’ says Hiroshi. ‘He wanted to make his museum cutting edge’. And, cutting edge it became, even by a busy downtown location that was unusual for a museum in Japan then and inspired by Shojiro’s 1950 visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.  

And while the art that Shojiro typically collected wasn’t created recently, it was on-trend with international art collecting, and of a kind then new to public display in Japan. To grasp how astonishingly new: when the Bridgestone Museum of Art opened in January 1952, it was the first place in Tokyo where you could see a collection of modern art. The second was the National Museum of Modern Art, opened in December 1952.

A New Museum

With the Museum open, Shojiro took steps to ensure that his collection would always be publicly available in the Museum. In 1956, he used his personal wealth to establish the Ishibashi Foundation, to manage the Museum and undertake other activities. And in 1961, he donated almost all of his collection to the Foundation, with the rest donated after his death by his son, Mr Ishibashi Kan’Ichiro, who later led the Foundation.

Then in 2012, changes in legislation initiated dramatic changes for the Museum – the Ishibashi Foundation was no longer a ‘foundation corporation’ but defined as a ‘public interest incorporated foundation’ that must look after the public interest.

By this time, Mr Ishibashi Hiroshi had become Director of the Museum and President of the Foundation (in 2014) and the need for a new Bridgestone Building was on the horizon. This was a ‘big opportunity’ in Hiroshi’s words, as he describes a time of extensive reflection for the Foundation after the legislative change.

 

KANO Michinobu, Pine and Plum Trees, Edo period, late 18th century. Installation view, 2024. Courtesy of Artizon Museum. Photo: KIOKU Keizo

 

‘We had to consider what kind of museum we wanted to build,’ says Hiroshi. ‘And that's where this marketing method that I'm familiar with became very useful.’  As when Hiroshi joined Bridgestone in 1972, with a wide-scale corporate rebranding about to start, his background proved particularly valuable. Hiroshi’s years in the US, 1964–1971, included studies in product design, initially car design, which integrated marketing.

‘Rather than only think from our perspective, we had to also take in the public’s perspective – how do they see us? How could we be attractive to the public? They were the sort of the things that we had to consider,’ continues Hiroshi, before squarely framing the situation in marketing terms. ‘In order for a product to be attractive, we must be market oriented.’

Museum interiors including Christian Daniel RAUCH’s Victoria, nineteenth century. Photos: Jane Johnston

 

The Foundation was also conscious of the Bridgestone Museum of Art’s audience demographic back then. ‘The customer segment was basically the seniors’, says Hiroshi, noting that this had to broaden. ‘Being public-oriented, we have to cater for all generations and think about what we could do to be attractive to young people.

‘One thing we thought about is, the new building must be of high-quality design, for a space that is not just stylish but also comfortable, and inspiring as well. And with the exhibitions, to be attractive to young people, naturally we had to build up our collection,’ says Hiroshi.

 

^1. DOMOTO Hisao, Solution of Continuity No. 9. 1964. Courtesy of Artizon Museum
^2. Installation view, Selections from the Ishibashi Collection, 2 Nov 2024 - 9 Feb 25. Courtesy of Artizon Museum. Photo: KIOKU Keizo.

 

After the Bridgestone Museum of Art closed in 2015, the entire Bridgestone Building was demolished, and the new name of ‘Artizon’ was announced in 2018 – a combination of the English-language words ‘art’ and ‘horizon’ to signify a museum with an international perspective, looking towards a limitless horizon of new art.

Hiroshi was very much in the driver’s seat as the new future-looking museum was realised, even in the development of the Museum Tower Kyobashi. ‘Because I was the President of the property management company [Nagasaka Corporation] at that time, I was also able to steer this building development in the right direction. For me, overseeing the design of this building was actually a product design in itself.’

 

How High the Moon, copper lounge by KURAMATA Shirō, designed 1986. Photo: Jane Johnston

 

When I ask Hiroshi what he thinks Shojiro would say about all this change, he smiles warmly and says, ‘Funny you should ask that. I ask myself that all the time. You know, we have made a drastic change. My father Kan’ Ichiro had seen how much his father had struggled to build his business and the museum as well, so I think for him the most important thing was to maintain what the founder had built.

‘But in my generation, you know, 60 years had passed since my grandfather had founded the Bridgestone Museum of Art and it was coming to the point where if I left it as it is, we would be left behind. Drastic change was essential.

‘I think Shojiro would say that he fully understands what I had to do. As I said earlier, he loved things that were new, cutting edge. I think that if he were living, he’d have done the same thing.’ Hiroshi pauses, and with a wry smile adds, ‘Of course, it is easier to demolish and deconstruct what you have made yourself, as the founder. So, thinking that he would have done the same, gives me a sense of comfort and peace of mind.’

Across the table, Hiroshi looks completely at ease as he says so.    

 

Paul CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir, c.1904-06. Courtesy of Artizon Museum