The National Museum of Western Art

Katsushika Hokusai is all the rage in Tokyo. Last year saw several acclaimed exhibitions dive into the ukiyo-e master’s ginormous oeuvre, and the Edo native’s iconic art has also been the subject of some pretty remarkable reinterpretations lately. Next up in highlighting the printmaking genius is the National Museum of Western Art, whose exhibition ‘Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji from the Iuchi Collection’ marks the first public unveiling of this remarkable group of works placed on deposit at the museum in 2024. The exhibition showcases all 46 prints from Hokusai’s iconic series Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji (c. 1830–33), alongside two additional impressions of his most beloved masterpieces, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (commonly known as ‘The Great Wave’) and Clear Day with a Southern Breeze (known as ‘Red Fuji’). You can look forward to exceptionally well-preserved impressions, including a rare indigo-printed ‘Blue Fuji’ version of Clear Day with a Southern Breeze. Bringing together all 48 works, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience Hokusai’s enduring vision of Mt Fuji within Japan’s premier museum of Western art – a fitting setting for appreciating his art’s timeless dialogue between East and West.

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) is one of Lithuania’s most celebrated cultural figures, a visionary who fused painting and music into a singular artistic language. Trained as a composer before turning to visual art in the early 1900s, Čiurlionis created more than 300 works in just six years, drawing on Art Nouveau, Symbolism and Japonisme while grounding his imagery in Lithuanian identity under Russian imperial rule. His dreamlike canvases, rich in myth and cosmology, reveal a rare talent whose life was tragically cut short at the age of 35. The National Museum of Western Art marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth with ‘The Inner Constellation’, running from March 28 to June 14. Presented in collaboration with the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas, the exhibition will feature around 80 major works, including the Japanese debut of The Altar (1909) and the monumental masterpiece Rex (1909), the artist’s largest and most enigmatic painting. Organised into five thematic chapters, the retrospective also highlights Čiurlionis’s innovations in integrating musical structures into visual art, presenting sonata-inspired series, handwritten scores, and his own compositions playing in the galleries. Here, audiences can fully immerse themselves in Čiurlionis’s cosmic vision of the human spirit and the universe.