When Alfred H. Barr (the founder of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) was sketching out the shape of modern art in the 20th century -- its movements, influences and directions -- he drew a kind of family tree showing how all the different "isms" connected to one another in an evolutionary way.
It was an ingenious way of making a story of art with seamless connections between diverse movements. Van Gogh was the first on the list, so he is ultimately the beginning of modern art in Barr's view. The 19th-century French painter Gustave Moreau was working at roughly the same time as van Gogh, but in Barr's diagram, he doesn't feature at all. Van Gogh, it seems, is one of the exemplary modern artists for our time. But where does that leave Moreau?
The last Moreau exhibition in Japan was 10 years ago at Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art. This time, owing to renovations being carried out at the Musee Gustave Moreau in Paris -- allowing several very important paintings like "The Apparition" (1876) to travel -- the symbolist painter's work is now on view at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, and will move to Bunkamura, Tokyo, in early August.