Japanese collectors keen on Western art for investment

Press, 17 March 1987, Page 45

Japanese collectors keen on Western art for investment

By

MAGGIE JACKSON

NZPA-AP Tokyo Wealthy Japanese art collectors are exploiting the soaring value of the yen to buy up major Western art works at a rate that may now outpace nearly every other nation.

Some works are displayed in public museums, art experts say, but many remain in private hands, never to be seen by art lovers.

Collectors are often so secretive that even Tokyo curators do not know where many of Japan’s major imported works are kept.

"It is really difficult to know who the collectors are, not like in the West,” said Sachiko Hibiya, Tokyo representative for Christie’s, the international auction house.

"They do not want to be known as collectors,” he said.

The reasons, curators and collectors say, include a desire not to flaunt wealth, worries about attracting the tax collector's attention, and a greater interest in investment than art for art's sake.

Ms Hibiya said “Private companies are buying some fine paintings, too, we think. But we do not know.”

What is not a secret is how much Japanese have been buying in recent months in New York and London.

The yen has risen about 60 per cent against the

United States dollar since late 1985.

With dollars cheaper, the Japanese have become, by some estimates, the second most important presence in the international art world, behind United States buyers. Susumu Yamamoto, a major buyer for museums and president of Fuji Television Gallery Co., Ltd, a prestigious Tokyo gallery, estimates that 30 per cent of world buying is currently Japanese. Last year at a Christie’s auction in New York, Japanese buyers bought almost 15 per cent of mostly French Impressionist works that sold for nearly SUS3O million ($53.4 million). At another auction in November, a record-breaking SUSS million ($8.9 million) was reportedly paid by a Japanese gallery for Piet Mondrian’s “Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow.” French impressionism was the important trend in the late nineteenth century, when Japan opened its doors to foreigners after 300 years of isolation. Japanese tastes since then have leaned heavily, some say almost exclusively, towards this period.

At a recent Christie’s auction, Japanese bought 40 per cent of the SUS 6 million ($10.68 million) worth of Impressionist paintings sold. One Tokyo collector estimated that 70 ger cent of Japanese •>1

collections consisted of Impressionist-era works. Some Impressionist works now in Japan include Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies,” “Waterloo Bridge in London,” and "On the Boat”; Pierre Auguste Renoir’s “Woman with a Hat” and “Parisiennes in Algerian Costume,” and Paul Gauguin’s “Two Breton Girls By the Sea.” Others include Edgar Degas’ “Woman Sponging Her Back” and “Dancers in a Rehearsal Room,” and Edouard Manet’s “Self-Portrait.”

Japan’s three finest Western art museums contain many of the works accumulated by three pre-World War II collectors who used their personal business fortunes to buy freely. Kojiro Matsukata, a self-made shipping magnate from the port of Kobe, began collecting European art during World War I, keeping his mostly late-nineteenth century works in France. After World War 11, the French Government seized his collection. But the French eventually released the collection with the stipulation that Japan build a public museum for it.

In 1959, some 300 pieces from Matsukata’s collection, including works by Monet, Renoir and Gauguin, were placed in Tokyo’s new National Museum of Western Art.

Shojiro Ishibashi used his Bridgestone Tire fortune to begin collecting Western-style Japanese and Western pieces, especially Impressionist works, in 1930. Twenty-two years later, he opened the Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo’s Ginza district “to display these masterpieces for the public (and) to promote cultural development in Japan rather than to hoard them for my own pleasure,” he wrote before his death in 1976.

Some 550 km south of Tokyo, in the ancient riceproducing city of Kurashiki, near Japan’s Inland Sea, a philanthropist and industrialist, Magosaburo Ohara, built one of the nation’s top repositories of Western art.

Ohara, who built a textiles and steel empire from his father’s silkweaving business, opened his museum of Western art in 1930, alongside his Japanese folkcrafts and archeology museums. While the major museums and some smaller local public museums display famous Western works, art experts say many masterpieces remain in private collections out of the public eye. Major museum curators know these works could add greatly to their special exhibits, but in order to borrow them, “it is important to know the

collector personally,” said Seiro Mayekawa, director general of the National Museum of Western Art. He said that he knows few collectors. One factor is the tax system, which severly taxes art purchases and inheritances.

“Most private collectors want to remain very much in secret,” said Akiyoshi Tokoro, a gallery owner specialising in Western art in the Ginza, where most of the city's galleries are clustered. “They are using ‘black money’ (undisclosed income) and do not like to be open about collecting,” he said.

Collectors today are sometimes wealthy artists or connoisseurs, but more often company presidents and executives buy art as corporate investment.

“Many people buy art in the name of their companies but keep it in their homes,” said a collectr, who estimated he owned up to SUS 26 million ($46.28 million) worth of art.

“There are two types of collectors — investors and real art lovers,” said Kojiro Ishiguro, a gallery owner and major collector of ancient Greek and Mediterranean art.

"Before the war there were many of the artlover type. Now, I think not all but most are just investors,” he said.