HW pt1: Art museum

My first destination in the city was the Prefectural Museum of Art. The building reminded me of the Whitney. Seventies grey brick with very clean corners. I liked it. Inside was that blessed hush combined with sub-zero air conditioning - that special art gallery feeling. I could pay 600 Yen for a normal ticket or 900 Yen for normal entry plus a special exhibition or 1200 Yen for the gallery, the special exhibit and the entry into the traditional Japanese garden next to the gallery. I could see some of the garden through the huge windows - a neat green square with leaves romantically scattered about, along the farthest side ran a collonade of vines under which were weather beaten adarondak chairs. Temptation enough! I took the really pricey ticket.

I spent and hour or two in the gallery's permanent collection. It is small but very well chosen and curated. You enter into a mini-sculpture hall. At the far end is a huge mother and child that looks like its made of gold but really thin gold with a light bulb inside because it glows. It is in fact the original plaster cast of a bronze but its lit so beautifully as to look like the light is internal. The sculpture was made shortly after the A bomb and shows a Pieta-like duo but instead of Mary's knowing calm, the mother is distressed, the weight of her dead child wrenching her arms down and pulling her back. I would say close to 60% of Japanese art I saw this weekend had a connection with the war or the bomb. It was quite harrowing and meant that when it came time to visit the A bomb museum itself, I just couldnt do it.

After the sculpture garden you find yourself in the European art room. As you enter Dali's enourmous Dream of Venus lurches at you. It is fucking wonderful. It is not his most famous drippy clock painting but it is a drippy clock painting and it is huge and when I finally let it have me I got lost in the landscape and the dali turquoise sky and the satisfying illusion of the drippy clocks for ages.
The other highlight of the room was an Arp sculpture called Birth or something equally non-descript. If you walked round and round the small bronze it seemed to morph and bubble becomeing a fish and then a bird and then a fish again. It was also perfectly lit. The lighting in the whole place so well done.

The second room of the permanent collection was Japanese art from the same period as the art in the European room (1915-1960) : war years. Apart from the work that was clearly influenced by the Bomb, I found it hard to distinguish Japanese-ness in the paitnings. They all looked like Miro or Picasso or German Expressionist knock offs. Which gots me to thinking: we allow our Western art to have Japanese influence (Van Gogh and his crew) or African influence (Picasso and his posse) but when the influence runs the other way, suddenly they become knock offs. Must all Japanese art look like wood block prints? To answer my question the next room housed a contemporary work by a Japanese artist consisting of ten or so kimonos suspended behind glass lit with surgical white light. I loved them. They were Japanese but they weren't wood block prints (which dont get me wrong, are really beautiful). I dont know what I was supposed to admire in the Kimonos: the cloth, the slight surreal oversized-ness, the craft of them. I ended up admiring the cloth which ranged from muted Japanese tartan (such a thing exists) to crazy Op Art blocks in neon pink and grey.

All this thinking and looking had made me very hungry so I treated myself to a posh lunch in the gallery resturaunt. Fish, pickles, rice, salad and accoutrements. plus coffee. I was the youngest person in the place by at least 30 years. Imagine upper east side matriarchs in pearls but make them Japanese - those were my fellow diners. Still, unlike the upper east side, I was treated politely, generously and kindlylee - I have yet to encounter anything but in this country.

The views of the garden were enticing me and even though I had a special exhibition calling me from the third floor, I reasoned, what if it rains later in the afternoon? Just a quick garden turn-around after lunch then I would give the special exhibition my full attention. The garden was just too much to ignore.