Each part of Italy has its own character, but Venice has always been something special and unique. While much of Italy was reduced to insignificant statelets, for much of the peninsula's history Venice was quite the reverse. It projected power far across the Mediterranean ...

The curators at Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art (NMWA) have decided that Japan, a country well-known for its own print art, should know more about the print art of Europe. In this endeavor, they have chosen the work of Israhel van Meckenem (c. ...

Every country tries to find an image that its people can believe in and unite around. Britain recently decided to become an island in its own right instead of a "Continental" country, tied mainly to the European Union. Japan, meanwhile, still seems caught between ...

We are only a month or so away from the Rio Olympics. While the world will soon be focused on that, in Japan many will also be thinking four years ahead to the Tokyo Olympics. It is easy, then, to see why the Tokyo ...

It's been a few years since the last big Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition in town. The last one, if I remember correctly, was "Renoir: Tradition & Innovation" at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). That brought over the French impressionist's "Dance at Bougival" (1883), an ...

Painters and trees have a lot in common. Both are light-catchers: the painter looks at the world around him and tries to capture it, while a tree catches the light in order to grow. Trees are also part of the world that many artists ...

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? ...

The best time to see Ito Jakuchu's work was back in 2000 or 2006, when there were two major exhibitions that aimed to re-evaluate the underappreciated 18th-century Kyoto painter. Now that re-evaluation has picked up plenty of steam we are currently experiencing a powerful "Jakuchu ...

When Japan opened up to the Western world in the 19th century, popular artistic tastes were dominated by two great woodblock print artists, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) and Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864). Contemporaries, keen rivals and both members of the Utagawa School, the pair had the ...

The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum has always had a connection with French glassware. After all, almost the first thing you see as you enter through the front entrance is a set of glass-relief doors with an angel motif. These were created by the ...