The current exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art could be considered a retrospective of Toshio Hara's career as a collector. Surprisingly, given that the museum was founded in 1979, it's the first time that the director and president has personally curated a show there, and the title is the pretty no-nonsense: "My Favorites: Toshio Hara Selects from the Permanent Collection."
The exhibition is in two parts, with the first, which runs until March 11, focusing on work collected from 1977 to the mid-'80s. This first selection includes pieces by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Yves Klein and Edward Ruscha, and, apart from anything else, reveals that opportunities to see seminal postwar modern art in Tokyo are quite rare. Contemporary art shows in other major museums tend toward current international art stars, or new emerging talent.
The 83-year-old Hara, an autodidact when it comes to art, has said that his buying choices have been a matter of pure subjective reaction to the works and getting to know the artists personally. In an interview published in 2008 in the excellent book "Art Space Tokyo," however, Hara noted that in the early years of the museum, the artists' relative standing in the international art scene was also something he considered.