Today we tubed all four points of the compass in our Tokyo circuit without missing a beat. It seemed like every time we figured out which subway line to take to our destination we were barely finished descending the stairs before the train appeared. In one instance the doors were closed as we approached and the conductor opened them again to let us on. At another point we surfaced to street level to make a connection to a bus which pulled up just as we looked up to find the bus stop sign. Suffice it to say, the mass transit system in Tokyo is phenomenal. It’s a wonder why anyone would bother taking a cab.
Our first subway ride took us to the Emperor’s Garden. This of course is where the Emperor has a palace, but it’s the grand expanse of the garden the size of Central Park that lends charm to Tokyo’s megalopolis.
From the garden we went to the National Museum of Art.
At the museum there was an exhibit of Klint paintings. The spelling is tricky. We’re not talking Gustav, we’re talking Hilma, and not Klimt, but Klint. Unfortunately HIlma was no Gustav. In the museum’s permanent collection I was fascinated by the large Japanese paintings showing the British surrendering Singapore in 1942 and the Americans being captured at Bataan.
There were no paintings of Japanese losing the war, however there was one that seemed to make a commentary on Japanese military tradition.
From the National Museum of Art we took a subway to catch a bus that stopped at the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum. There was an exhibit which featured Pati Smith doing a maudlin monotone voiceover while we watched footage of a dead whale washed up on a beach followed by some poorly shot freeway footage cut with an outtake from a Pasolini film. Dreadful. It was like a bad parody of Lori Anderson.
Out of the contemporary art there was one piece, or rather, pieces by Teruya Yuken that caught our attention. Teruya had taken seven McDonald’s take-out bags and cut them so that the inside of the bags held a tiny tree. He called it: “Forest, Madison Avenue.”
I didn’t know, but Moira knew the painting that “nothing to glorify” is taken from. It is Jean-François Millet’s “The Angulus.” She recognized it immediately. Here is a link
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angelus_(painting)
Yes, the card identifying the painting mentioned the Millet painting that was the inspiration. In one of the WWII battle paintings a Japanese soldier struggling with an American GI was based on a Delacroix painting of Jacob wrestling with the angel.