"The Meeting of East and West"... First printed in 1996 with this phrase as its keyword, "ART MAISON INTERNATIONAL" has received favorable response from art lovers the world over as the only international art book in Japan to comprehensively introduce contemporary Japanese art. To the extent that the pages of the book allows, REIJINSHA publishes the works of numerous artists who, while establishing their domicile within the art world of Japan, have had their talents recognized by various persons related to the arts on an international level. ART MAISON INTERNATIONAL further offers critiques of individual works and the corresponding artists by famous art critics in order to assist in the readers' appreciation of that work.     1945 witnessed the dropping of the first atomic bomb in human history on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Amongst the confusion and poverty after its defeat, one after another, many Japanese artists who had needed to remain silent up till then aggressively presented their work even while enduring the material hardships of those days. Within a darkness from which no reprieve was visible, they continued to light the beacon of hope. Then, facing the high economic growth period of the 1960s, competent artists who began to enjoy those economic riches appeared in a variety of art fields and, one by one, they have steadily left the footprints of postwar Japanese art to history.   ▲Return to top of page