Museum Folkwang opens the year of its centenary with major Impressionist show Renoir, Monet, Gauguin – Images of a Floating World. The Collections of Kojiro Matsukata and Karl Ernst Osthaus

The Museum Folkwang is celebrating its 100th anniversary in Essen this year and is looking back on the (Post-)Impressionist beginnings of its collection with the exhibition highlight Renoir, Monet, Gauguin – Images of a Floating World (6 February – 15 May 2022): The important collection of (Post-)Impressionist works from Museum Folkwang, founded by Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921), will enter into dialogue with the collection of Kojiro Matsukata (1866–1950) from the holdings of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. With around 120 masterpieces by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin, among others, the show illustrates how modern French art was not only appreciated by Western collectors at the beginning of the 20th century, but also found an early following in Japan. This is told through two pioneers of the modern museum: the collectors Matsukata and Osthaus.