The Tokyo Fuji Art Museum was founded 30 years ago today, on November 3, 1983. In celebrating this milestone, TFAM Director Akira Gokita issued the following statement:
When I first visited the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in November 1983, I had the opportunity to see, for the first time and with my very own eyes, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, the 1826 masterpiece by Eugène Delacroix. It was an occasion that I will never forget.
Two years later, I was hired as a curator for TFAM. Since then, I have organized, promoted and supported exhibitions, contributing behind the scenes as best I could. The history of TFAM exhibitions, then, has become inseparable from my life, from my very soul.
In the early days of our museum, our private collection was meager and our record of achievement nonexistent. Yet we curators carried on, collecting works of art over the years with great care and patience, and presented exhibitions from time to time. We were sustained in this task by the constant encouragement from our founder, Daisaku Ikeda, and have remained faithful to his mandate that TFAM serve as “a portal to the world.”
Today, a new, young generation of TFAM staff has succeeded our commitment and spirit of professionalism. We learned this spirit from René Huyghe, the esteemed member of the French Academy and Louvre Museum curator who also served as the honorary curator of our museum. He insisted that we treat each piece in our collection with the highest respect and that we should never be swayed by the trends of the day. “Draw out the original soul of the work,” he would tell us, “and simply present it.”
And we are confident that we have been true to his instruction, presenting exhibitions featuring the finest Western paintings, from the Renaissance to the modern era. This, after all, is an axiom for which all art museums have followed. And this, we hope, is what we achieved with our latest exhibition, “Impressionists at the Waterside,” with its wondrous display of works.
Fine art emancipates the human spirit and forges the bonds that bring people together. We believe TFAM serves as a bridge linking cultures, connecting the world to deliver inspiration and dreams for all. That is both our goal and challenge as we move ahead, toward further milestones in the future.
Akira Gokita
Director, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum
