Adachi Museum of Art

▶The Path to the Founding of the Museum
Adachi Zenko was born on February 8, 1899, in Furukawa, Iinashi Village, Nogi County (present-day Furukawa-cho, Yasugi City, the site of the museum). Immediately after graduating from elementary school, he helped with farming at his family home, but seeing his parents work themselves to the bone without reward, he resolved to pursue a career in business. At the age of 14, he took a job transporting charcoal by handcart from Hirose Town, about 3 km inland from the present museum, to Yasugi Port, a distance of 15 km. While doing this work, he came up with the idea of retailing charcoal. On the way to Yasugi with extra charcoal he had purchased, he sold it door to door in nearby homes and earned twice as much as his transport wages. This can be said to have been his first business venture. After that, through many twists and turns, he started various businesses, and after the war, while engaged in textile wholesaling, real estate, and other businesses in Osaka, he collected Japanese-style paintings that had interested him since childhood, and gradually became known as an art collector. His interest in gardening, which he had loved above all else since his youth, also grew steadily. Finally, in 1970, at the age of 71, he founded the Adachi Museum of Art as a way of giving back to his hometown and contributing to the cultural development of Shimane Prefecture.

▶Episodes from His Art Collection
Adachi Zenko’s passion for collecting is well known, but perhaps the most memorable episode was his bulk purchase in 1979 of a group of Taikan works from the Kitazawa Collection, including Koyo (Autumn Leaves), Ameharu (After the Rain), and Umi Shio Shidai: Natsu (Four Scenes of the Sea Tide: Summer). In 1978, when he saw Koyo (a six-panel folding screen) at a Yokoyama Taikan exhibition in Nagoya, he was so deeply moved that he was left speechless. Determined to acquire it at any cost, he explored every possible avenue and discovered that it was part of the Kitazawa Collection, said to be a “phantom collection” that had never been shown outside the family. At the time, the collection was in the hands of a trustee, and in addition to Koyo, it contained nearly 20 works by Taikan, most of them pieces that had been exhibited publicly. Even more surprisingly, it included Ameharu, a painting he had long clipped from an art book, framed, and gazed at daily without tiring, a work he had even dreamed about. After great effort, and after negotiations had almost been concluded over a period of two years, he was told that Ameharu and Umi Shio Shidai: Natsu should be removed from the purchase list. Unable to remain silent, he reportedly spoke out before the board of trustees, saying, “It’s like courting a woman you fell in love with at first sight for two years, finally arranging the bride-price and getting ready for the wedding night, only to have her run off carrying the pillow. Isn’t that a bit much?” In the end, he is said to have won them over with his heartfelt appeal and secured the museum’s purchase of the works.

▶Yokoyama Taikan and Adachi Zenko
In his autobiography, Adachi Zenko wrote:
“The Adachi Museum of Art is sometimes called the ‘Taikan Museum.’ It is probably described that way because it houses so many masterpieces by Yokoyama Taikan, who left an immortal mark on the history of modern Japanese painting. Certainly, the foundation of the Adachi collection is modern Japanese painting, but the true backbone of the collection, both in quantity and quality, is Yokoyama Taikan. Having long been enthralled by Taikan’s greatness, I feel as though I have fulfilled a lifelong wish. If I were to sum up Taikan’s appeal in one word, it would be the excellence of his conception and expressive power. Perhaps no one could imitate it. His vigorous spirit of seeking constantly challenged new things and made them his own, and it was this that gave his works their power, depth, and fine compositional unity. This, I believe, is why he is said to be a painter who appears once in a hundred years, or perhaps once in three hundred years. It is nothing short of mysterious that an artist of such magnitude and a failure like myself should be brought together through painting. If there is even a little similarity in our spirit and attitude toward life, nothing could make me happier.”

Taikan, who revived the Inten exhibition with fierce determination and continued to produce great masterpieces one after another, and Adachi Zenko, who from the age of 14 or 15 pulled a handcart through the snow of the San’in region barefoot in straw sandals and rose from absolute poverty to possess Japan’s finest Taikan collection, surely shared more than just a life of hardship. They also seem to have had much in common in their extraordinary ideas, brilliant originality, and vigorous ability to act. For example, Taikan revolutionized the world of Japanese painting by devising new techniques such as kara-bake, while Adachi, despite saying he was a complete novice in museum management, used innovative methods to build a museum that welcomed more than 500,000 visitors a year and became one of the most highly visited in Japan. In both cases, we see a shared freedom of thought unbound by old conventions. Taikan’s breadth of artistic range and Adachi’s inexhaustible variety of ideas also reveal an expansive perspective.

Moreover, Taikan, who might seem bold and uncompromising, nevertheless had the courtesy to see off a young framer who came and went to his home, all the way to the entrance, no matter how drunk he was. Adachi, who might seem like an absolute autocrat, was humble enough to ask even those of us who were like his grandchildren, “What do you think?” and seek our opinions. And despite his busy schedule, he would prepare notes the day before even for a brief few-line interview with a local newspaper, handle it skillfully with a touch of wit, and then collapse from exhaustion afterward. In these respects too, the two men seem remarkably similar.

▶Dreams and Romance
Until his death in 1990 at the age of 91, Adachi Zenko continued to hold fast to his dream and vision of making the Adachi Museum of Art a world-class museum. When I think of him looking at the garden morning and evening, and calling the gardeners to take command personally whenever something displeased him even slightly, or of him passionately saying about a painting he had failed to acquire years earlier, “Indeed, encountering a masterpiece is like meeting a person; it is a matter of fate. Collecting paintings is not about money. It is not about price. If something good appears, you should shut your eyes and seize it. What a terrible pity that I missed that painting. Even now, I sometimes wake suddenly in the middle of the night and remember it, and then I cannot sleep,” it seems clear that, whether it was the paintings he encountered, the gardens, or the people, what lived throughout the Adachi Museum of Art was his desire to convey to others the feeling of being moved by beauty. Adachi Zenko was a man who never ceased to wish for a museum that would inspire every visitor who came.