AS A MAJOR international art centre on a par with London and New York, Tokyo and nearby Yokohama experience a wide range of museum exhibitions every year. With many periods, locales and styles on display throughout the year, it's sometimes difficult to pick obvious trends. Last year, a clear trend started to emerge in the late summer, with an unusually large number of Chinese historical exhibitions.
This year, however, the trend is already clear, with several major exhibitions that showcase the canon of European art and the treasures of European museums, giving the calendar a distinctly classical European feel. Already, there's been the opening of Mucha: From Prague to Paris at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and Marcel Duchamp and the 20th Century at the Yokohama Museum of Art. Later in the year, there'll be exhibitions from Moscow's Pushkin Museum and Germany's Dresden State Art Collections.
Spring is usually the signal in Japan for major art events and this year is no different, with several impressive exhibitions scheduled. In early March, the National Museum of Western Art will host Georges de La Tour: A World of Light and Shadow, with about 30 works by the 17th-century French baroque painter, whose style was heavily influenced by the deep shadows and light effects of Caravaggio.
Neglected until recently, de la Tour's works are mostly held by French provincial museums that have been happy to lend their works to Japan, so that most of the known paintings of this great artist will be gathered in one place. It remains to be seen whether Japanese audiences will fully appreciate this fact, as de La Tour is still a comparative unknown in the country.
The relative obscurity of the artist won't be a problem at another exhibition that will open in March: Van Gogh in Context at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The problem with Van Gogh is the opposite. He's so well known by Japanese audiences that he's overshadowed by his legend - something assistant curator Kenjiro Hosaka bemoans.
'Van Gogh is thought of as a genius or a madman,' Hosaka says. 'That's just a story, a legend. It makes it difficult to get to the real information on him. It gets in the way of his social and historical background. Most audiences like legends. They need legends to get a grip on the art, but we want to look around the legend. We want to break the legend.'