A Hawaii Treasury. Masterpieces from the Honolulu Academy of Arts

30 May - 16 July 2000

Hours: 9:30a.m.- 5:00 p.m.
Entry is permitted thirty minutes before the galleries are closed.
Closed: Closed on Mondays

Admission: charged

“A Hawaii Treasury”, as its name suggests, presents a selection of outstanding works covering a century of modern European and American art from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, that treasure-house of art afloat in the Pacific Ocean.

The islands of Hawaii, famed throughout the world as a paradise of eternal summer, are home to people of many different races. First unified as the Kingdom of Hawaii by Kamehameha I in 1810, they have, in the process of modernization, taken in immigrants both from mainland America and from Japan, China, and other Asian countries, so that by now, bringing together as they do people from many differing backgrounds, they can be called a true meeting-point of the cultures of East and West.

The Academy, which was founded in 1927 on the basis of the personal collection of Anna Rice Cooke, a focal resident, has long been familiar to Hawaiian citizens and tourists as Hawaii’s only comprehensive collection of fine art, and its collection of some 34,000 pieces from Europe, America, China, Japan, Africa and elsewhere has a high international reputation. The present exhibition brings together for the first time in Japan some of the Academy’s finest specimens of oils, watercolors, sketches, sculpture and soon from nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and America and elsewhere.

The European section in itself constitutes a kind of survey of modern art, from Delacroix, via Monet, Cezanne and other artists of the Impressionist school, to Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, de Chirico and Moore. The other main section, on American art, includes works by Cassatt, Whistler, Sergeant, 0’Keeffe, and Kuniyoshi Yasuo, the Japanese artist active in America, they range from majestic natural landscapes to pictures of contemporary society, and include works showing Hawaiian customs and scenery.

This is the first time that such a large body of works has been sent on loan to a foreign institution. We feel sure that it will provide an opportunity for the appreciation not only of modern European and American art, but also of some aspects of the Hawaiian culture that developed from contacts between East and West.

We would like to express our deepest Gratitude to the Honolulu Academy of Arts, for the loan of its precious works of art and for its overall cooperation, and to all those others whose help has made this exhibition possible.