Toward the 50th Anniversary Collection 1 : Self / Action - The National Museum of Art, Osaka

The National Museum of Art, Osaka opened in 1977 in the former Expo Museum of Fine Arts, located within Expo ’70 Commemorative Park in Suita, Osaka Prefecture. The museum relocated to a new building on Nakanoshima in 2004, and in 2027 it will mark its 50th anniversary. As that milestone approaches, the 2026 collection exhibition spans two installments, drawing on the museum’s own holdings to revisit developments in art, and the social and historical conditions that shaped them, in the years leading up to the museum’s opening.

Since its opening, the museum has positioned itself as an institution focused on contemporary art, collecting and exhibiting works produced primarily from 1945 to the present. The collection, however, also includes works classified as “modern” art. The term “contemporary” itself names no fixed historical span, simply meaning “of the same time” or “of the present.” What we now call modern was once itself “contemporary,” and the art of today stands on the foundation of the thought and creativity that has accumulated from the modern period onward.

The Collection 1 exhibition spans the period from Paul Cezanne, long regarded as the father of modern art, through the mid-1960s. The art of these decades saw the establishment and destabilization of the artist-as-self, a singular “I” as author of the work, alongside a profound shift in the theory and practice of the act of making. Drawing on landmark works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition traces an art-historical narrative still subject to reassessment and revision today.