Former Main Building, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura

The Museum Became the Standard for Culture and Art amid the Post-war Chaos and Recovery

The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura opened as Japan’s first public modern art museum just six years after the Second World War ended, when the country was still under U.S. occupation. The idea to build an art museum came from those in the art world in Kanagawa who were inspired to do so and established the Kanagawa Prefecture Artists' Assembly. It had 33 members, including artists and researchers such as Ikuma Arishima, Sotaro Yasui, Seiji Chokai, Kiyokata Kaburaki, Seison Maeda, and Shinsui Ito.

The building was designed by Junzo Sakakura (1901–1969). After graduating from the Art History Department, Faculty of Letters at Tokyo Imperial University, he went to France and studied at the office of the modern architectural master Le Corbusier. Sakakura won the Grand Prix for architecture at Expo 1937 Paris for his design of the Japan Pavilion. Although modest by today’s standards with a total floor area of 1,575 square meters, the museum became a Japanese architectural landmark in the immediate aftermath of the war. The inaugural exhibition was “Cézanne and Renoir.”