Japan's Picture Boom

"We couldn't have gotten a better price," said Director Thomas P. Moving, struggling to defend the clandestine sale of the Metropolitan Museum's major Rousseau, The Tropics, which--together with a Van Gogh--went out the back door to a dealer for a rumored total of $1.5 million. He might have tried Japan first. Last week Tokyo Art Dealer Tokushichi Hasegawa took delivery of the Rousseau, which he had bought from Marlborough Fine Art in London and resold to an Osaka businessman (anonymous, for "tax reasons") for $2,000,000. Said Hasegawa who, at 33, is vice president of Nichido Gallery, Japan's largest art shop: "I only felt sorry that I couldn't pick up the Van Gogh as well."

Names. High as the Rousseau's price was, it made no stir in Japan's suddenly febrile art market, which is a reflection of the country's prosperity. One of Hasegawa's neighbors in the Ginza, the Yoshii Gallery, sold a Rouault oil to a collector for $2.6 million last year, and Japan's new passion for Western painting has been reflected in similarly inflated prices all the way down the line. Works by the old reliables of the Paris School--Chagall, Modigliani, Renoir, Picasso--many of inferior quality and some of them outright fakes, routinely go for 20% to 2,000% above their New York or London prices. About 500 galleries have mushroomed in Japan, and especially along the Ginza, in the past few years. Says Dealer Yoko Fukushima: "The mad Japanese buying abroad has long turned Tokyo into the world's best market for second-rate works by first-rate artists. Japanese buy names, not quality." Even the patriarchal trading houses of Japan are in on the act --sometimes with depressing results, as when the huge Marubeni Corp. added art to its "general trading" department (along with cement, cameras and sundry goods) and got stuck with a dubious Botticelli at $500,000. "I still don't know anything about this business," admits the Marubeni staffer who was shifted from exporting Japanese toys to importing European art.

Many Japanese corporations consider it a necessary status symbol to hang a Matisse or a Renoir in their VIP reception rooms. Japan's newly rich are also well aware that such art is now a good investment. One Osaka real estate baron recently won fame in the trade by phoning an art dealer these directions: "Get me 100 million yen [$330,000] worth of art--get me whatever you think would prove moneymaking." Japanese art buyers are operating like Sony executives all over Europe and the U.S. "No hammers go down nowadays either at Christie's or Sotheby's," one of them placidly observed last week, "without at least one of us raising his pudgy hand."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.