Museum Folkwang Essen - Böcker

From Renoir to Monet to Gauguin – French Impressionism was not only appreciated by Western collectors at the beginning of the 20th century – it also found an early following in Japan. In 2022, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, the Museum Folkwang will show its outstanding post-impressionist collection founded by Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921). The museum collection will be supplemented by Impressionist highlights from the Kojiro Matsukata Collection (1865–1950), which laid the foundation for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. This is the first time this collection will be presented comprehensively outside Japan since the 1950s. The catalog features a unique compilation of about 120 works and introduces two important collectors. Transnational collection history is combined with modern masterpieces. Featuring paintings, drawings and sculptures by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin, among others, as well as a new installation by Tabaimo and Chiharu Shiota and a selection of East Asian works from the former holdings of Matsukata and Osthaus. Accompanied by a short story by Japanese bestselling author Sayaka Murata.

How do we want to live together in the future? We Is Future: Visions of New Communities revolves around the longing for an ideal community, a life in harmony with nature and with each other. Looking at 120 years of artistic visions, the six chapters within this book lead from the Life Reform movement around 1900, via the visionary architectural designs of Bruno Taut or Wenzel Hablik, through to Constant’s urban utopia New Babylon, built around the of idea the playful human being. It also examines the Hippie Modernism of the 1960s and moves on to consider contemporary positions that suggest a symbiosis of all living beings in and with nature. The works presented are an expression of a striving for new ways of living in the present and the future. The artistic perspective within the publication is expanded by scientific and personal contributions and an artist interview. Its sustainable design also traces an ideal.