ABSTRACT
The Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (Kanagawa-kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan) (Figure 5.1) opened in the City of Kamakura, in Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1951. Kanagawa Prefecture is located south of Tokyo, and Kamakura is an old shogunate capital, established at the end of the twelfth century, famous for its great number of historic monuments, temples and shrines. The Museum was built on the site of the Tsuruoka Hachimangu Shrine, which had been one of the most important places for worship since the early stages of Kamakura’s development. It was the first regional public art museum to open after World War II, and also the first ‘museum of modern art’ (‘kindai bijutsukan’) in Japan. My discussion in this chapter focuses on the establishment of this museum, not because it typically conformed to the emptiness of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, but because, on the contrary, it established its own category in the style of regional art museums in Japan. The Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art was a new type of empty museum. It was, in a sense, as ‘empty’ as the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, without its own collection and permanent exhibition. However, it was distinguished from the Tokyo Museum in that it had full-time curatorial staff. This one difference made a considerable impact on the curatorial policy of the Kanagawa Museum, as well as the development of other public art museums in post-war Japan. The curator (gakugei’in) was not completely a new agent in the artistic field in Japan, but it was not until the post-war period that this profession started to be recognized officially and socially as an important agent, rivalling the art groups in the regional art museums and, more broadly, in the artistic field.
