The story
On the riverbank in Nakanoshima, the island district in the middle of Osaka, the museum stands as a plain black box, five storeys high, designed by the architect Endo Katsuhiko. Visitors ride up through the building to galleries on the top two floors, and out on the plaza sits Ship's Cat, a giant cat figure by the artist Kenji Yanobe.
The building opened only in February 2022, yet the collection inside is far older. Osaka decided in 1983 to build a museum of modern art after the estate of the businessman Yamamoto Hatsujiro gave the city several hundred works, rich in paintings by Saeki Yuzo, an Osaka-born painter of Paris street scenes. For almost 40 years the city went on buying while the museum stayed on paper, and by opening day it held about 6,000 works, Japanese and Western art from the late 19th century to today together with a large design collection.
Its first major Western purchase was Reclining Nude with Loose Hair, painted by Amedeo Modigliani in 1917, and Modigliani was the subject of the museum's first special exhibition. Elsewhere in the collection are a still life by Giorgio de Chirico, The Forces of a Street by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and some 800 works by Yoshihara Jiro, leader of the postwar Gutai group of avant-garde artists, most of them given by his family.
