The story
The Menard Art Museum sits in Komaki, a city near Nagoya, and it grew from one couple's habit. Daisuke Nonogawa, founder of the Nippon Menard cosmetics company, and his wife Mitsuko collected art for about 20 years before opening this museum in 1987 to show it.
The holdings run past 1,400 works and mix Japanese and Western art, so a visit might put a van Gogh landscape from 1889 near a Manet portrait, then a room of modern Japanese painting. Only a few dozen pieces are out at a time, rotated through several exhibitions a year, so the museum you see in spring is not quite the one you would find in autumn.
