Since its opening, the Seibu Museum of Art actively introduced contemporary American art to Japanese audiences, helping to establish what would later become one of the principal strengths of the Sezon Museum of Modern Art collection. This exhibition was presented as part of the international touring retrospective of Jasper Johns, held between 1977 and 1978. Johns is widely recognized as a pioneering figure who bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in the history of postwar American art.
Planned from 1975 by the artist and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition was realized with the support of Leo Castelli Gallery—which had presented Johns’s first solo exhibition featuring the now-iconic motifs of targets, numbers, and flags in 1958—and the Philip Morris. Beginning at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition traveled to Cologne, Paris, London, Tokyo (Seibu Museum of Art), and San Francisco.
Following a series of exhibitions introducing American art—including The Martha Jackson Collection, Thirty Years of American Art, and Masters of Contemporary American Art—the Seibu Museum of Art presented a major retrospective of Jasper Johns. Comprising 172 works, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures from his early career to his most recent works, the exhibition offered a comprehensive overview of the artist’s achievement.
Two works featured in the exhibition, Target (1974) and M (1962), are now in the collection of the Sezon Museum of Modern Art.