The story
At the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, the chairs belong to the collection, and you are meant to sit in them. Designer seats from around the world stand from the basement to the top floor and are changed several times a year, among them Marilyn, the sofa shaped like a pair of red lips by the Italian group Studio 65.
The building was the first museum designed by Kisho Kurokawa, the Japanese architect best known for the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Ginza. It opened in November 1982 in Kita-Urawa Park, on the site of a former high school, and Kurokawa placed it among the trees of the park. Out in the park stands one of his capsules, a one-room unit of the type that made up the Ginza tower until it was demolished in 2022.
The painting most tied to the museum was bought the year before it opened. Claude Monet's Haystacks at Giverny, Evening Sun, from 1888, was the poster image for the first exhibition, which ran from Impressionism to the School of Paris. French pictures by Pissarro, Signac and Renoir hang alongside works by Picasso and Chagall, and a large part of the collection belongs to modern Japanese artists linked to Saitama, such as Ei-Q, who lived in Urawa.
