The story
On a rise above central Toyota, the Japanese city best known for its carmaker, the municipal art museum occupies the site of Koromo Castle, whose rebuilt corner turret still stands near the entrance. The museum opened in 1995 in a building by Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect who later redesigned the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His long, low volumes of stone and glass look out over a broad shallow pool, in grounds laid out by the American landscape architect Peter Walker. A cubic sculpture by Sol LeWitt and a rusted steel plate by Richard Serra greet arrivals outside.
The collection is built around art since the beginnings of modernism, Japanese and Western side by side. Its best-known picture is Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi, painted in Vienna in 1913, the sitter in a loose patterned robe against a bright yellow ground. Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka are here too, and James Ensor's Garden of Love of 1888 entered the collection in 1993, two years before the doors opened.
A separate wing, also by Taniguchi, is given to Takahashi Setsuro, an avant-garde artist who worked in lacquer, and a small tea house of Taniguchi's design sits in a corner of the front garden.
