The story
Three years before it opened, this museum started an argument. In 2022 Tottori Prefecture paid nearly 300 million yen for five of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, the painted wooden copies of supermarket soap-pad cartons that he first exhibited in New York in 1964, and the price drew mixed reactions from residents. The boxes went on show when the doors opened.
That was on 30 March 2025, in Kurayoshi, an old castle town in the middle of the prefecture, beside the ruins of the ancient Ōmidō temple. The building comes from Maki and Associates, the Tokyo firm founded by the architect Fumihiko Maki, and its galleries open onto a wide lawn, with more daylight than most art museums allow. The collection, more than 10,000 works, came over from the art department of the older Tottori Prefectural Museum in the city of Tottori, and much of it is by artists with roots in the prefecture. Western painting is there too, among it a study of a dozing woman by Gustave Courbet, the French realist, from around 1852.
