The story
On the tenth floor of the Aichi Arts Center, in the Sakae district of central Nagoya, a knight in golden armour rides a black horse across a dark canvas. This is Life is a Struggle, also known as The Golden Knight, which Gustav Klimt painted in Vienna in 1903 with oil, tempera and gold leaf. It was the first work by Klimt to enter a Japanese public museum, and it is still the best-known picture in the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.
The museum opened here in 1992, when the prefecture gathered theatres, a concert hall, an art library and galleries into one building. Its predecessor was a prefectural art gallery that had opened in Sakae in 1955. The collecting policy points at the twentieth century, so the rooms run from Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard and Max Ernst to post-war painters such as the American Morris Louis, with modern Japanese painting and crafts beside them.
Two local gifts give the collection much of its character. Fujii Tatsukichi, who helped modernise Japanese crafts, left 1,477 works. Kimura Teizo, a Nagoya collector who died in 2003, gave hundreds more in his lifetime, and his daughter added nearly 3,000 after his death, including more than 200 works by the painter Kumagai Morikazu. They now fill a room of their own, where the display changes in rotation.
