Exhibition TAIZI HARADA AND FELLOW PAINTERS FROM CROATIA

11.12.2007

BIG NEW SUCCESS OF CROATIAN NAÏVE PAINTERS IN JAPAN A few days ago, on Wednesday, April 26th 2006, the paintings from the touring exhibition "Taizi Harada and Fellow Painters from Croatia", which started in the Harada Museum in Suwa, Japan, at the end of September last year, and then figured in four more places in Japan, from Tokyo (Nihonbashi and Shinjuku) via Osaka and finally Fukuoka, at last came home to the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art. Together with the celebrated Japanese painter, Taizi Harada, the exhibition featured works by eight of our most eminent artists of the Naïve: Ivan Generalić, Emerik Feješ, Matija Skurjeni, Ivan Rabuzin, Ivan Večenaj, Mijo Kovačić, Ivan Lacković and Josip Generalić. Just how successful the exhibition was can be seen from the fact that it was seen by more than 71,000 visitors, placing it among the three most visited and successful CMNA projects in the last decade. The exhibition in Florida, at the Museum of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, was attended by 50,000 art lovers; the presentation in Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin was seen by more than 67,000 visitors. As a matter of interest one might mention that the Speaker of the Japanese parliament, Mr Yohei Kono, in company with the Croatian Ambassador to Japan, Dr Drago Štambuk, spent more than two hours touring the show. In addition, numerous Japanese tourists visiting the permanent display of the Museum in Zagreb say that they saw or read about the exhibition in their home country. This major success must be attributed in large measure to the organisation of the exhibition by the leading Japanese newspaper "Asahi Shimbun", which has a circulation of over eight million; this is the third project initiated and implemented with the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art in the last twenty years. The exhibition was accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue on 120 pages, with colour reproductions of all the painters, and the textual part about the Croatian artists written by Vladimir Crnković, collection manager and director of the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art. There can be no doubt that the success of the show was to a large extent the result of the critical selection of exhibits, for the project featured only the major artists of the Croatian Naïve and their key, anthology-piece and typical works. As well as from the collection of the CMNA, the exhibition also featured works from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; the Matija Skurjeni Museum in Zaprešić; Podravka of Koprivnica; the private collections of Ivan Rabuzin, Ivan Lacković and Ivan and Josip Generalić and Matija Skurjeni. Since the CMNA is planning for the end of 2006 a big critical exhibition entitled "Art without Frontiers / Foreign Masters from the Collection of the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art", Taizi Harada very kindly at our request donated a picture so that we might be able to include him in the exhibition. This admirable gift, which was brought to Zagreb together with the exhibits from Japan, will very shortly form part of the permanent display of the Museum. This donation is the more valuable when one knows that Harada does not sell his pictures at all and that the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art is the only institution outside Japan to possess an original by this artist. Catalogue TAIZI HARADA AND FELLOW PAINTERS FROM CROATIA 19,5x25,5 cm, 120 oo., text in Japanese reproductions: 70 in colour, 39 black and white.