Cy Twombly at the Hara Museum
Jul. 12th, 2015 23:21![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyI went down to Shinagawa today to one of my favorite museums in Tokyo, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. It's housed in a small but beautifully converted (pre-war) Showa-era mansion, and I've seen some really great shows there--last year when I was here I saw Nicolas Buffe's first solo exhibition there, "The Dream of Polifilo," which was a site-specific installation combining Renaissance art, Disney animation, video games, and manga, and was pretty amazing. That exhibit even had the gallery attendants take on the role of sprites and put them in costumes that the artist had designed, and you could go into some of the art itself--a "save point" was a takeoff on a Zen hut, for example. Enchanting, and just sheer fun.
Cy Twombly is one of my favorite 20thC artists, not only because his work is idiosyncratic and great but because he is, I think, one of the foremost interpreters of the classical Mediterranean of the past century. I first encountered his series of paintings on the Iliad in an austere gallery devoted to them in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I've loved his work ever since then. In a weird way that makes total sense when you think about it, the bleakness of the postwar 1950s world view among artists was perfectly suited to the bleak, bloody worldview of the ancient world's myths, if people were willing to pull back the cruft of Victoriana that had accumulated on it. This exhibition, a repeat of one staged at the Hermitage in the previous decade, collected works on paper, including major clumps of work from the 1950s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the early 2000s. (Twombly died in 2011.) I'm mostly familiar with his large paintings, which is what museums tend to have in their general galleries. These works, smaller but still intense, were all compelling, but I liked the works from the 1980s--often vibrantly colorful, and clearly not less complete works than his larger paintings, even though most of them were actually mixed media collages. The works from the 1980s and 1990s flirted with representation at times--bicycles, irises--but retained enough of Twombly's style to make it clear that representation was only part of the story. Many of the works from the 1970s and 1980s were some of his meditations on the classics, including pieces on Apollo, Venus, Orpheus, Adonais, Plato, and Pan. The painting about Pan--actually partly a collage--consisted of two white rectangles of paper, with a botanical illustration of chard superimposed on the top one, and a rectangle of paper on which Twombly had written "PAN" and "(panic)" in his crabbed scrawl above a smear of brown paint--blood? mud? somewhere in that range--that rectangle of paper itself exceeding the borders of the larger sheets. I have rarely seen a more accurate depiction of the god. I thought the Plato piece was very witty too: a rectangle of blue sky inside a rectangle inside an oval crossed with measuring lines. Great stuff.
It was positively downpouring last year when I went, so it was actually the first time I'd been in the sculpture garden since 2008; much as I liked the Lee U-Fan sculpture and the Sol Lewitt incomplete cube, the best sculpture was clearly a witty commentary on the Ming tiles the Dutch and others favored for fireplaces in the 17thC, except depicting hallucinogenic substances.
Cy Twombly is one of my favorite 20thC artists, not only because his work is idiosyncratic and great but because he is, I think, one of the foremost interpreters of the classical Mediterranean of the past century. I first encountered his series of paintings on the Iliad in an austere gallery devoted to them in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I've loved his work ever since then. In a weird way that makes total sense when you think about it, the bleakness of the postwar 1950s world view among artists was perfectly suited to the bleak, bloody worldview of the ancient world's myths, if people were willing to pull back the cruft of Victoriana that had accumulated on it. This exhibition, a repeat of one staged at the Hermitage in the previous decade, collected works on paper, including major clumps of work from the 1950s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the early 2000s. (Twombly died in 2011.) I'm mostly familiar with his large paintings, which is what museums tend to have in their general galleries. These works, smaller but still intense, were all compelling, but I liked the works from the 1980s--often vibrantly colorful, and clearly not less complete works than his larger paintings, even though most of them were actually mixed media collages. The works from the 1980s and 1990s flirted with representation at times--bicycles, irises--but retained enough of Twombly's style to make it clear that representation was only part of the story. Many of the works from the 1970s and 1980s were some of his meditations on the classics, including pieces on Apollo, Venus, Orpheus, Adonais, Plato, and Pan. The painting about Pan--actually partly a collage--consisted of two white rectangles of paper, with a botanical illustration of chard superimposed on the top one, and a rectangle of paper on which Twombly had written "PAN" and "(panic)" in his crabbed scrawl above a smear of brown paint--blood? mud? somewhere in that range--that rectangle of paper itself exceeding the borders of the larger sheets. I have rarely seen a more accurate depiction of the god. I thought the Plato piece was very witty too: a rectangle of blue sky inside a rectangle inside an oval crossed with measuring lines. Great stuff.
It was positively downpouring last year when I went, so it was actually the first time I'd been in the sculpture garden since 2008; much as I liked the Lee U-Fan sculpture and the Sol Lewitt incomplete cube, the best sculpture was clearly a witty commentary on the Ming tiles the Dutch and others favored for fireplaces in the 17thC, except depicting hallucinogenic substances.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-12 14:42 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-12 14:45 (UTC)P.S. You must eat Capogiro gelato while you're there. It is the best gelato in the Western Hemisphere, imo.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-12 15:12 (UTC)