It must be something of a Faustian bargain buying a Post-Impressionist painting for a record-breaking price. In 1987, Yasuo Goto, president of Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Co., bought Van Gogh's "Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" (1888) for $39 million. Perhaps due to that daring purchase, his company, now merged in Sompo Japan, has ever since felt a strong obligation to maintain a high profile in the art world.
Visiting the Sompo Japan Museum — located on the 42nd floor of a skyscraper in Nishi-Shinjuku — feels like going back in time to Japan's famous "Bubble Economy" days of the 1980s. This was a time when Japanese corporations were suffused with limitless ambition, and the idea of buying up some of the world's best art and creating a famous art museum seemed all too easy.
But a lot has changed since then. It's clear that Goto's ambition was never quite realized. The museum, now known as the Sompo Japan Museum of Art, has fallen out of the limelight to a certain extent and has had to eke out a more difficult existence. I even get the impression that if the Sompo didn't have its famous Van Gogh, it might have decided to throw in the towel long ago, as other corporate museums have done. But it does have it, so the art continues.