In this series, we introduce the people who work at the National Center for Art Research (NCAR). This third installment focuses on the Collections Group, which is deeply involved in the activation of museum collections.
The group’s activities revolve around two areas
The group advances the activation of collections held by national museums, and it also promotes scientific research on artworks at the museums and the conservation of these works. The activities of the Collections Group revolve around these two areas. This article will familiarize readers with the efforts of the Collections Group by introducing the Collection DIALOGUE and Collection PLUS collaborative projects, which aim to encourage the utilization of collections, and the workshops and lectures that bring experts together to share knowledge and information about the conservation of works of art. We spoke with four Collections Group staff members.
Profiles
Otani Shogo, Head of Collections
After serving as a senior curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, became the museum’s deputy director in 2022. In April 2022, concurrently joined the Preparatory Office for the establishment of the National Center for Arts Research, taking up his current role leading the Collections Group.
Tanaka Masafumi, Senior Curator, Deputy Head of Collections
Worked as a public art museum curator, and has been involved in opening a new municipal art museum and reopening a prefectural art museum after rebuilding. Joined the National Center for Arts Research in October 2022 when it was still in the preparatory phase.
Toriumi Hidemi, Conservator
After working on the conservation, maintenance, and documentation of artworks and cultural properties in Japan and overseas, assumed her current position in April 2023.
Nakao Yui, Curator
After working at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Division of Craft and Design), and the National Crafts Museum, assumed her current position in April 2024.
Dual projects to encourage the activation of collections
From 2003 to 2024, each year one of the national art museums mounted a traveling exhibition to showcase its collection at a number of art museums around the country. With the aim of making effective use of national museum collections, along with enhancing the opportunities for viewing such art in art museums nationwide, the program also encouraged people to take an interest in modern and contemporary art. For example, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo might be responsible one year, exhibiting pieces from its collection at prefectural art museums and municipal museums of art. The next year, pieces from the National Museum of Art, Osaka might be shown at different art museums as the traveling exhibition. In this way, the public had the opportunity to appreciate items from national museum collections in various locations, with the museum responsible for the exhibition rotating each year.
While this was a worthwhile program, the hosting museums ended up simply providing a venue for exhibitions of national art museum collections, according to Head of Collections Otani Shogo.
“The museums that served as venues for the traveling exhibitions have their own captivating collections that are underpinned by their own visions. I thought that if curators from museums around the country could take advantage of national museum collections to come up with plans to present works connected to their own collections, it would strengthen their motivation to plan exhibitions and give people the opportunity to see items held in national museum collections from a fresh perspective.”
In addition to making the collections held by national art museums available to the public nationwide, NCAR consequently launched the Collection DIALOGUE and Collection PLUS programs to contribute to activating the collections held by museums around the country.
Collection DIALOGUE is a program under which a national art museum and a local museum collaborate to plan and organize an exhibition featuring works from each of their collections, based on a specific theme. Collection PLUS is a program for mounting special exhibitions that highlight the appeal of a museum’s collection by adding one or more related pieces from a national museum’s collection to an exhibition of the works in a local museum’s collection. The former has museums collaborating on equal footing to take advantage of a national museum’s collection and a local museum’s collection; the latter focuses on a local museum’s collection but uses related works from a national museum to draw attention to works that can go unnoticed by visitors in a regular exhibition.
The first call for proposals was made in 2023, and preparations are currently underway for holding the first Collection DIALOGUE exhibition in 2025. Also in 2023, the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum mounted Rey Camoi’s Spanish Period: With the Work of the Baroque Master Jusepe de Ribera (April 7–June 11, 2023) as a preview program for the Collection PLUS. The exhibition featured nine works by Kamoi Rei (1928–1985), an artist with ties to Nagasaki who spent nearly four years in Spain starting 1971, alongside a piece by Spanish Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652).
Rey Camoi’s Spanish Period: With the Work of the Baroque Master Jusepe de Ribera, exhibition view, 2023, Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum
It is known that Kamoi frequently visited the Prado Museum while he was living in Spain. He was a keen admirer of the art of Spain’s Golden Age (late sixteenth century to seventeenth century), and he was particularly attracted to the art of Jusepe de Ribera. Ribera’s piece, Philosopher Crates (1636, collection of the National Museum of Western Art) was placed in the center of exhibition room, with four of Kamoi’s works from his “pre-Spanish period” and five from his “Spanish period” on either side, inviting visitors to envisage what Kamoi absorbed from his Spanish surroundings. For more information, see the report, Collection PLUS Highlights Latent Appeal of Works in Collection.
The first Collection PLUS exhibition, selected in fiscal 2023, is currently being shown at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts (October 26–December 22, 2024). Collection 3 Osakabe Jin and Gustave Courbet: The Eyes of Landscape Painters exhibits six works by Tochigi Prefecture native Osakabe Jin (1906–1978) that are in the collection of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts along with two works by Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) from the National Museum of Western Art.
Deputy Head of Collections Tanaka Masafumi, who handled the coordination with the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, talked to us about the show.
“In 2023 the National Museum of Western Art mounted La Bretagne, source d’inspiration: regards de peintres français et japonais, which included works by Kosugi Misei (Hoan) loaned by the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts. Collection PLUS became of topic of conversation between representatives of the National Museum of Western Art and Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, and apparently this led to the current project. The national art museums maintain a database of the works in their collections, and art museums—public and private—have forged close relationships through lending and borrowing works. I’m looking forward to seeing the compelling Collection DIALOGUE and Collection PLUS exhibition plans that emerge from these relationships.”
Collection 3 Osakabe Jin and Gustave Courbet: The Eyes of Landscape Painters, exhibition view, 2024, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts
Art museums around Japan each have their own unique characteristics and outstanding collections. While special exhibitions prominently featuring famous artists tend to attract large numbers of visitors, local museums are also able to mount well-rounded exhibitions that solely display works from their own collections. Especially in the wake of the pandemic, people have been re-evaluating the worth of museum collections, and exhibitions that take advantage of collection works have begun to attract attention.
Starting in fiscal 2025, the plan is to increase the number of museums mounting Collection PLUS exhibitions to three each year. As the number of these compelling projects that take advantage of national art museum collections grows, and as more local museums gain the experience of organizing such exhibitions, it should raise the profile of the collections of art museums across Japan.
The techniques and philosophy of conservation
The Collections Group offers practical workshops and lectures by conservators who are leaders on the global stage each year, as part of its project for conservation of art works. If the lecturer is not a Japanese speaker, an interpreter translates the lecture into Japanese on the day of the workshop, slides are translated into Japanese in advance for distribution, and information about reference materials is provided in advance so that participants can prepare.
It is important to disseminate the content of these lectures and workshops. Due to limitations on the space and materials available, workshops must be limited to around twenty participants. To make the information available to anyone interested in the conservation of artworks, not to mention those who were unable to participate even after requesting a spot, after an event the group shares information about it using means such as preparing a report with illustrations and recorded images or distributing a video recording. The technology used in the field of conservation and the information that is available is constantly advancing, so the content of these workshops is an invaluable source of information for experts who are always striving to acquire new knowledge and skills.
In fiscal 2023, in cooperation with the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, the group held Workshop on Restoration Treatments for Cultural Property - The Modular Cleaning Program Workshop. The lecturer was American conservator Chris Stavroudis. Stavroudis is the developer of the Modular Cleaning Program, which uses computer programs to choose the formulations of solvents used for cleaning artworks, and he has conducted more than seventy workshops on this program around the world.
The three-day workshop was attended by conservators in a variety of fields, including oil paintings, East Asian paintings, Buddhist statues, crafts, textiles, and paper. In the workshop, seventy participants attended his lecture on basic cleaning theory and on the Modular Cleaning Program in the morning. In the afternoon, twenty-one of the participants completed the course by receiving practical training in preparing cleaning solutions and performing cleaning tests on a variety of sample materials.
Preparing cleaning solutions
Cleaning test practice
Toriumi Hidemi, who oversees conservation, explained the intentions behind her selection of cleaning as the topic of the workshop.
“Conservation skills used to be passed down through apprenticeships, but now they are thought to be something that should be learned academically in the course of obtaining a university degree (references: The Conservator-Restorer: a Definition of the Profession , International Council of Museums – Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC)) and Professional Guidelines (III) Education, European Confederation of Conservator-Restorers’ Organization (ECCO) ).
Our invited speaker, Chris Stavroudis, takes a very logical approach to conservation. He prepared dozens of solvents, gradually changing the pH (hydrogen ion concentration) and conductivity, and then added surfactants, chelating agents, gelling agents, and other chemicals, compiling data on the effects of each solvent to show which is suitable in which situation. I selected cleaning artworks as the theme of our first NCAR conservation workshop because I thought that learning directly from him about the intent behind the development of the Modular Cleaning Program and how it works might significantly change how we think about the materials used in artworks and our approach to conservation.”
Explaining how to use the Modular Cleaning Program
On the day after the workshop, Stavroudis also presented a lecture, Conservation of Modern Art: Jackson Pollock’s Painting, that was attended by ninety-two participants. Participants were introduced to a case study on the project to examine and restore Number 1, 1949 (1949) by American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Through this, participants were able to experience the new conservation technique that was the topic of the workshop—a technique that takes a scientific approach, using a computer database. And this was also an opportunity to once again recognize that conservation is a field that requires the observational and analytical skills of the conservators themselves.
The content of the workshop and the lecture are available on the NCAR website. For more information, see the report: Workshop on Restoration Treatments for Cultural Property - The Modular Cleaning Program Workshop and [Conservation Lecture Video] Conservation of Modern Art: Jackson Pollock’s Painting.
In fiscal 2024, in collaboration with the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, the group invited an expert in photo conservation to present a workshop on the topics of photographic process identification and photo preservation and also to present a lecture on the development of analog photography and the preservation of photographs as cultural properties. Otani, who leads the group as Head of Collections, talked to us about this.
“When it comes to traditional culture, such as Japanese arts and crafts, there has been much research on conservation. However, when it comes to modern and contemporary art, especially works from the latter half of the twentieth century onwards, conservation has a short history, and we need to think about guidelines for conserving this art. For example, if a piece used fluorescent lights, is it acceptable to replace them with LEDs when the fluorescent lights are no longer manufactured? Or, if a video work was recorded on videotape, will it no longer be viewable if the videotape can no longer be played, or will it be viewed by transferring it to a different medium, and will the image quality of that medium differ from the original videotape? Works that used industrially produced materials are in unknown territory when it comes to how these materials deteriorate and how to conserve them.
If artists and owners of artworks do not share ethical values and methodologies for conservation, it could result in tragedy in the near future: we may no longer be able to appreciate a work in its original state, leaving it to become merely an illustration in an art book. Therefore, even in the field of modern and contemporary art, there is an urgent need to build up a reserve of experience and research in conservation to ensure that we leave works of art in good condition for future generations.”
Growing possibilities arising from scientific research
As part of its conservation work, the group also conducts scientific research on artworks. When she was at the National Crafts Museum in 2023, Curator Nakao Yui asked NCAR to cooperate on a scientific examination of a poster by graphic designer Sugiura Hisui (1876–1965).
Nakao, who was in charge of handling this piece, talked to us about her thinking at the time.
“When a museum loans a work to another museum, curators make condition reports that record the condition of the work in detail so they can check if anything is amiss when the work is returned. One time, I had the chance to lend out a poster by Sugiura Hisui, and while I was inspecting the condition of the work I noticed that places that looked like brown pigment under low-light conditions appeared to sparkle under bright LED lighting. Because factors causing works on paper to deteriorate include exposure to ultraviolet rays, care must be taken to avoid displaying them under strong lighting in order to keep them in good condition to pass them on to future generations. I had seen the work many times before, but this was the first time that I had noticed this. I wanted to know whether the sparkle was due to pigments or due to the printing technology. I also wanted to know about Hisui’s intentions, and I thought that this might be useful in some way for the study and conservation of the artwork, so I decided to ask NCAR to cooperate in a scientific investigation.”
The scientific investigation looked at posters, magazine covers, and other items printed based on the original artwork by Sugiura Hisui. The team examined the paint using high-resolution microscopes and x-ray fluorescence analysis. To supplement this examination, it also looked at other information such as the kind of technology used by the printing company where Mitsukoshi Gofukuten had placed the order for the poster. As a result, we discovered that brass powder was used in the printing process to create the gold color, and that it probably shone a brighter gold at the time than it does now.
Nakao offered more information about the project.
“This research revealed that at the time, printing technology and artistic expression were more closely connected than we had imagined. The findings of this scientific study are to be summarized in a paper jointly authored by the members of the team who participated in the investigation, which is to be presented in a bulletin published by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. I believe that the results of this scientific research will not only contribute to art history research, but will also lead to the collection of important information that will be useful in conserving works of art.”
Conducting scientific research on Sugiura Hisui's poster
Photomicrograph of Sugiura Hisui’s Service Extended to Mansei-bashi, Tokyo Subway (c.1929)
In order to enjoy works of art and pass them on to future generations, we must not neglect to pay attention to both how we activate these works and how we conserve them. Through the Collection DIALOGUE and the Collection PLUS programs, the Collections Group enriches experiences of art. At the same time, the group disseminates and shares reliable information about the essential process of conservation, as well as information about the need for new techniques.
(Interviews, text, and group photos by Nakajima Ryohei)
