Behind the Scenes at the Sakai Alphonse Mucha Museum

The Sakai Alphonse Mucha Museum stands out as a rare Japanese example of an art museum dedicated to the works of the famed Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), and houses an extensive collection of his works from early in his career to his final years. Each year, we at the museum hold three themed exhibitions, and through the prism of a different theme each time, cast light on Mucha’s appeal from new perspectives.
With the museum, we perform a wide variety of roles: from gathering and preserving articles, to carrying out investigative research, putting on exhibitions, and conducting educational activities. With this exhibition, we hope to draw back the curtain on the largely unseen, day-to-day work that we do to support these roles, by looking at our work in the four areas of collecting, conservation and restoration, education, and curation. In doing so, we will look at pieces in our own collection, and use our museum as an example to take a look at what goes on behind the scenes at an art museum.
We hope that both first-time and regular visitors to this museum will gain an insight into the museum’s running, and that it will provide an opportunity to consider the future of our museum and art museums in general.