Chiaki What was the first picture you bought?

Umeno The first was Ai-Mitsu’s “Thistle”. I had money from selling part of my father’s collection. What should I buy with it? I wanted to buy something good and not be cheated. And then I found a strange picture reproduced in the magazine “Bijutsu Techo”. I wanted that picture, so I telephoned the magazine, was given the family’s address, wrote a letter, and Ai-Mitsu’s widow Kie let me have “Thistle”. That was the beginning of my collection of pictures.

Chiaki I see.

Umeno This year, in the Ai-Mitsu exhibition, that picture was made into a postcard.

Chiaki Do you still have it?

Umeno No, that picture is gone. I fell in love with a certain woman, and I let it go to pay for a trip to Nikko. I wrote about this in my book “Hunter of Beauty”, and enough time has passed that I can tell you now. (laughs) Collecting is interesting precisely because your own private drama comes alive along with the pictures.

Chiaki In what way, concretely?

Umeno For example: this is the picture I met and bought when I was struggling at work. When I look at the pictures I have collected, a scene from my own life comes back to me.
One picture, and the memories come round like that. So when a rich man buys an expensive picture and puts it straight into storage to wait for the price to rise, I think what a dull thing that is. In my encounters with pictures there is the joy of the discovery, and the memory of the hardship, and the memory of hesitating between one and another — every single picture in the collection is packed with that drama. In every one of them is the memory of my heart’s search for a lover.

Chiaki Some people now seem to be buying pictures as an investment. What do you think about that?

Umeno People say that the back of a picture is a security certificate. If you ask what human desire everyone is interested in today, it is money. Most desires can be settled with money. People want money in order to satisfy their desires. I take a slightly different view.
I think there is something wrong with it. About pictures especially I am a purist. I love pictures purely. Having finished my life as a salaried man and reached retirement, I then took up the trade of the art dealer, which is the very battlefield of collecting. I opened Art Research Geirin in Kyobashi, Tokyo; since I could not pay the rent unless I sold pictures, I had no choice but to take out a dealer’s licence.

Chiaki Ah — I have heard of this from my father, our chairman. That you were dealing in Kyobashi, and that he was much indebted to you. Thank you.

Umeno At the time the dealers I knew were all against it: this is not something an amateur can do. But I had lived wanting to become “a man who can see beauty”, and in my fifties, when I was earning well, I was happiest of all. I could find and buy what I liked, one after another, with my own eye. In those days I bought up whole groups of works nobody knew — Nakamura Chuji, or Ita Yusei — directly from the families. And I began to make their names known.

Chiaki There are many people who like looking at pictures but never buy one. What do you think is the difference between only looking and actually buying?

Umeno (vehemently) Look — where something you love is concerned, not buying means you do not love it. If you truly love a picture, if you truly like it, I think you buy it. Many people look at pictures and do not buy, but I suspect most of them are looking in order to have something to say to others, or are looking without feeling anything.
If you feel without being moved, it is the same as not having looked at all. Beauty is my heart. My heart is what I myself long for.
In another person’s beauty I see the beauty I long for. When I find that I share the maker’s feeling, I cannot help buying.
And I can pick out the famous and expensive ones — I have looked at so many pictures and so many catalogues that I have an instinct for the genuine and the false. There are many unsigned things I have dug out. But to what I do not share a feeling with, I am indifferent. If you are buying for the value of the property, then of course you should seek out the famous and the expensive.

Chiaki I see.

Umeno …But lately I have tried to listen to the words of people who feel for the things I dislike. There is a great deal of beauty I have overlooked in what I most dislike.
I thought Kusama Yayoi’s work was interesting from her debut, but I also thought I did not like it — and then she grew more and more famous, and when I read what her admirers had written I found myself thinking, ah, I see.
Ah — so this is a beauty I missed. But at any rate, it is better not to buy what you dislike.
I try not to buy a picture merely because the painter is skilful, because the technique is good. I collect what I share a feeling with — and not only that, what carries the same clarity as my own feeling.
I long for what is pure. And good things, whenever I look at them, quietly console me.

Umeno When I started Geirin, I decided that in the very middle of Tokyo I would take my chances on what I loved. And I decided one thing.
It was that I would do something different from the dealers of the day. Essentially I would work with dead artists whom the dealers did not handle and the critics had overlooked. I had dealt with dealers for a long time, so I told myself: I will not do the bad thing. What is the bad thing? When I said at a gallery, “I want to buy this,” the dealer would say “take it” without even a deposit.
And because I love pictures, when told to take it I would take it away at once, and then meet the next picture I wanted, and the next, and carry them all home until I could not pay. (laughs)

Chiaki (roaring with laughter, then soberly) That would be a problem.

Umeno It would! And I thought there must be plenty of customers like me. So I never handed over a work until it had been paid for. I asked for a deposit as a rule, and I allowed payment in instalments over a year.

Chiaki I see. So that is how you did it.

Umeno Whether it was thanks to that or not, I never once had a bad debt. And it was a family business, with my wife and daughter. Apart from fixed deposits I never borrowed at all. The banks said again and again, “We will lend, we will lend,” but I never once borrowed. The times were also good while I was running Geirin. Today the trade faces a much harder environment.
If you ask what I was selling in my work, it was that I sought out with my own eye the artists who had been forgotten and buried, and made their names known.
I traced the families of dead artists I loved who had been buried, and held memorial exhibitions for thirty-three of them.
I shall not forget being able to hold, fifty years after their deaths, memorial exhibitions for Yoshida Taku and Matsushita Haruo, painters who died young. And when the gallery opened I began writing a monthly report, handwritten with photographs pasted in.

Chiaki That is the “Geirin Monthly Report”.

Umeno I have issued the Geirin Monthly Report since 1985, without missing a single month. I went on writing it after the Umeno Memorial Gallery opened; it now stands at number 269, twenty-two years of writing. It goes to our special members. Persistence is strength, and a good many collectors now read it. I had found things no critic had found, so I wanted to speak of my own beauty in my own words.

Chiaki You were running Geirin — and how did this memorial gallery come to be founded?

Umeno It was in the autumn of 1993 that I heard from Watanabe Takeshi, a member of Art Research Geirin, my gallery in Kyobashi, Tokyo, that an “art village park” was being built in a place called Kitamimaki Village in Shinshu, and that there were plans for a museum there.
I was soon to turn seventy, and I had been looking for just such a chance — to hang in a wide space the works I had gathered over so many years, to look at them, to show them all together and put their meaning to the world.
I visited the place, walked in the quiet park where woods and pond were in harmony, and met the cultural understanding and discernment of the village mayor, Mr Koyama; and I decided without hesitation to move my base to this village museum and to give the rest of my life to honouring artists who had died.
Mayor Koyama even gave it the name Umeno Memorial Gallery, so I promised to become its director and move to the village, and from two years before the opening I made a catalogue — an unusual one, in which everything but the artists’ biographies was written by me, recording my memories of the collection.
The Umeno Collection is the sum of two generations of picture collecting, my late father Umeno Mitsuo’s and my own. On the founding of the gallery I decided to give the village four hundred and thirty works from the collection, including more than fifty by Aoki Shigeru, who had been my father’s friend.
I think this collection is proof that, without a fortune of hundreds of millions, one can build a collection as individual as this if only one has a heart that seeks beauty and a sure eye. I think of it as my message to the lovers of art in this world.

Chiaki Yes, indeed.

Umeno There are very few public museums that bear a collector’s name. There are a few, but I think I may be the only collector who has entered a city museum and serves as its working director.

Chiaki I think you are.

Umeno I am no millionaire; I was only an ordinary salaried collector. We run this museum with the public authorities and ourselves together.
If this way of doing things succeeds, I think it may throw a stone into the question of what Japanese museums should be in future. And I mean to go on, patiently, with the art education the country failed to provide after the war.
It is small, but I want to keep at it. I am proud that the Umeno Memorial Gallery now has the largest friends-of-the-museum membership of any public museum in Nagano Prefecture.