Several years ago, Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, approached Mori Building Co, Tokyo, about setting up a Guggenheim branch in Tokyo. The Guggenheim has recently opened centers in Bilbao, Berlin and Las Vegas. The idea was, in the end, rejected, but it did inspire MBC, Tokyo, to set up its own museum.
Although this has left Guggenheim with no dedicated venue in Tokyo, this year they have brought a selection of their collection of modern art to Tokyo's Bunkamura Museum in Shibuya. This, as Krens says, is a result of "Guggenheim's international vision to reach the widest possible audience and to share its collections as much as is realistic."
Modern art in the West came about, in part, through an unprecedented degree of contact with world exhibitions and imports of art from other cultures. You can detect the Japanese influence in Van Gogh's farmer tramping through a field in "Landscape with Snow, Late February" (1888), on display here, which is drawn from the perspective of the farmer himself like the Japanese scenes of ordinary life that the artist studied so much.