Museum at Atami

Our last day was perfect. We traveled to Atami, which is close to Tokyo where we needed to catch our plane. Atami reminded me a great deal of Scigliano, my grandfather’s birthplace in southern Italy. Both towns are built into mountains so the roads wind with nothing level. And, like Scigliano, the local drivers are quite confident in these winding roads where you can’t see who is coming around the corner in the opposite direction. While nothing will top the experience when my cousin drove in-and-around the Scigliano mountain roads at 100 mph, Attami was also unnerving since everyone in Japan drives on the left side. Consequently, you always have the sense that you’re on the wrong side of these windy, hilly, narrow, mountainous roads. Total fun.

In the morning we went to the Museum of Art in Atami which had a collection ranging from ancient to contemporary pieces. The entire building is sparse with an architectural that plays up open spaces, straight lines, and uses dark colors to produce warmth. It is quite different from the Italian galleries where every corner holds some piece for viewing. One of the most amazing uses of the local geography is how it plays into the mountain—there are a series of escalators starting at the low point of Atami and climbing up near the top of the mountain. The experience is powerful and the entrance has been used for installations:

 

To avoid getting overwhelmed in the museum—and with an art history of which I am hardly familiar—I focused on two contemporary artists. The first was Matsumoto Tetsuo (in the west, we’d reverse the names) who had paintings of various waterfalls from around the world including Niagara and Victoria Falls. I enjoyed the water as I do in Debussy’s La Mer although my experience of the Niagara Falls painting was a bit odd. Lily and the boys and I visited my brother in Rochester last year and I saw Niagara for the first time. It was awesome, for sure, however I was surprised how commercial the area was (and yes, we were on the superior Canadian side) so when I think about Niagara, the neon lights are part of my image. Matsumoto’s painting was free of commercial buildings and my reaction was to see the falls somehow more purely which, when you think it through, is an interesting simulacrum. In the few moments as I viewed the painting, I preferred the artwork to the actual falls—the copy to the real. Interesting.

Here are some examples:

My favorite work, by far however, was by an artist named Nagasana Akira and I spent most of my time with his paintings. The only way I can describe it is a primitive, bright colored, rough abstraction of images. The images below don’t do justice, but it should give you an idea of his work. The first, Blue Tiger (2007) is a good example (the intricacy of shapes in the face of the tiger are lost in the image):

This is Tiger Taking a Big Leap (2008 ) and the canvass is twice the size of the Blue Tiger which makes the leap bigger than it appears:

A more disturbing painting was entitled Noir and it was next to the Blue Tiger which highlighted the dark face (as opposed to the white in the face of the Blue Tiger):

Anyway, I didn’t think I’d enjoy the museum, but I did. I’m finding that focusing on one, small area always returns rewards. At the Uffizi in Italy, I was so tired of Roman busts and religious art from the Middle Ages, I ran through the centuries until I arrived at the early 17th century—Caravaggio forward—and stayed with those artists.

And so what else did we do on the last day? We found one of the best restaurants of course! We were near the Atami train station and our parties split between two restaurants. Luke and I went to an unagi place which only made unagi—small, medium, and large unagi. The restaurant was at the top of some very narrow stairs and was a hole in the wall. There were maybe 10 seats, four of which were at a counter and the chef was a rather large gentleman who made the unagi in the tiniest kitchen. I watched him as he gently cooked and marinated the unagi over the fire and had—by far—the best unagi of the trip. Luke was just as amazed and we took our time enjoying our last restaurant meal. It was the perfect goodbye to Japan.