The Museum’s collection has been shaped through its exhibition activities at Seibu Department Store Ikebukuro, the Seibu Museum of Art, Sezon Museum of Art, and Sezon Museum of Modern Art. Its starting points was Japan’s first exhibition of Paul Klee, held at Seibu Department Store Ikebukuro in 1961. Since then, the Museum has organized exhibitions of major twentieth-century artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, while acquiring works through these activities. Furthermore, the Museum was among the early institutions in Japan to focus on postwar American contemporary art, acquiring works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella. These works have since become one of the cornerstones of the Museum’s collection.
In 1975, the Seibu Museum of Art opened with the inaugural exhibition A View of Japanese Contemporary Art, introducing artists such as Shusaku Arakawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Tadanori Yokoo, Keiji Usami, Hisao Domoto, Kumi Sugai, Mitsuo Kano, and Isamu Wakabayashi. As exemplified by the complete 127-work series The Mechanism of Meaning by Shusaku Arakawa and Isamu Wakabayashi’s vision for the Museum garden, the Museum has systematically collected works and archival materials through sustained relationships with artists.
In 1981, the Takanawa Museum relocated to Karuizawa and reopened with the exhibition Marcel Duchamp. Since then, the collection has continued to grow alongside the activities of what is now the Sezon Museum of Modern Art. Today, the Museum holds approximately 800 works, spanning from Man Ray’s Le Couple (1914) to contemporary works of our time.
In COLLECTION, visitors can explore not only the Collection Database but also the relationship between artworks and the Museum’s exhibition activities, including exhibition histories dating back to the Seibu Department Store era. Together with the exhibition chronology, exhibition records in HISTORY, and the history of the Museum garden, these materials trace the development of the Museum’s collection.