The story
Kitakyushu was only 11 years old as a city when its art museum opened in 1974. Five towns on the northern tip of Kyushu, among them the steel town of Yawata, had merged in 1963, and the new city gave its museum a hilltop site and a building by Arata Isozaki, the architect who later won the Pritzker Prize. Two long galleries of square section jut out from the slope towards the city, and locals call the building the Binoculars on the Hill.
To mark the opening, the museum bought a damaged picture. Edgar Degas had painted his friend Édouard Manet lounging on a sofa while Manet's wife Suzanne played the piano, and gave it to the couple. Manet, by one account unhappy with how his wife looked, cut away most of her side of the canvas, and Degas took the picture back. What hangs in Kitakyushu shows Manet whole and only part of Suzanne at the keyboard, with a strip of blank canvas later attached along the cut edge. The industrialist Matsukata Kōjirō, one of the great early Japanese collectors of French art, had brought it to Japan.
The collection also holds Monet's Water Lilies, Reflection of Willows, painted in his garden at Giverny in his later years, and Renoir's Woman in a Straw Hat from 1880.
