TANIUCHI Rokuro’s Works; from the covers of the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho
Various buildings

In the TANIUCHI Rokuro Pavilion, we display the original paintings for the covers of the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho. Creating them was the life work of Taniuchi Rokuro (1921-1981), who produced 1,300 of them. Here we present a selection from that huge oeuvre of fifty paintings at a time, changing the exhibits four times a year. The choice of paintings is based on a variety of themes, with a new theme chosen for each exhibition.

The current display entitled “Various Buildings” focuses on the buildings depicted on the magazine covers. There are a variety of buildings Taniuchi portrayed—apartments built during the period of high economic growth after World War II, straw-thatched old houses, brick factories, and wooden school buildings, few of which we come across nowadays; those each revealing regionality such as sake cellars, factories in the Keihin Industrial Zone, kokeshi studios, where traditional wooden dolls are made, and kilns where ceramics are fired; and foreign buildings Taniuchi visited when he traveled to France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, or Sweden. Ice-Cream Wind captures a wind vane on a white building in a mountain village, which appears to be an agricultural experiment station or an observatory. To Taniuchi, the way the wind made it rotate from time with a rattle seemed as if “ice cream was being scooped from the mountain.” In Sorrow of the Votive Horse Tablet, he sensed the “smell of a sorrowful history” in an old gallery of votive horse tablets. Through the buildings featured in the covers of Shukan Shincho, we hope you will be able to relive the postwar Showa era depicted there and the scenes Taniuchi Rokuro witnessed, and appreciate the richness of his imagination which developed from such views.