It would have been difficult to find a more dramatic backdrop for last week's press conference announcing that Mori Art Museum's British-born director David Elliott will be leaving after October, and that his second-in-command, Fumio Nanjo, will take over the helm of Japan's largest privately endowed art institution.

The conference was scheduled for the late afternoon in a westward-facing conference room near the top of the Mori Tower in Roppongi. As Elliott, Nanjo and Yoshiko Mori, the museum's chairwoman and wife of real-estate developer Minoru Mori, took stock of how far the young, ambitious institution has come in the last three years, a setting sun appeared behind them, blazing forth for almost exactly the length of their speeches before disappearing behind distant mountains. And, just like that, the era of Elliott came to a rather abrupt end.

Elliott, 57, made history as the first foreigner appointed to head a museum in Japan. Drawing him away from his position as director of Moderna Musset in Stockholm, the Moris handpicked Elliott to create a progressive international center for the arts that would fit into Mori's millenarian conviction that he is not in the business of making buildings, but of "building cities." The ambitious experiment would take pride-of-place on the top two floors of Mori Tower, the high-rise centerpiece of the $2.25-billion city-within-a-city Roppongi Hills.