Hakone Open-Air Museum – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

This morning was an art morning for me in Hakone, Japan. I started at the Hakone Open-Air Museum and didn’t get beyond it until after lunch.

I’ve been to museums in other countries that refer to themselves as open-air museums. They are generally places where the museum brought in a collection of old, not replicas, residential and commercial buildings from around the area where the museum is, or perhaps from different regions of the country it’s in, and then plunked them down in a large space for people to gawk at.

That’s not what the Hakone Open-Air Museum is. Instead, it’s basically a sculpture garden.

Even if an uncouth, tasteless, art-indifferent (at best) pleb has permanent sole-residency status in your body, as one does in mine, I still highly recommend a visit to the Hakone Open-Air Museum.

If, like me, art isn’t really your thing, don’t think of it as a sculpture garden. Think of it as a stunning park with a bunch of art thrown in. That grossly underplays the art, but is still not far wrong.

One of my guidebooks recommended walking to the Okada Museum of Art after visiting the Hakone Open-Air Museum. At the start of the morning, I thought I’d do that. But, as I said, I unexpectedly spent the entire morning, and then some, at the Hakone Open-Air Museum.

When I looked at a map, I saw that the Okada Museum of Art would be a further twenty-minute walk away from where I was thinking of going in the afternoon. Not only that, the map said that the walk would involve a 90-metre rise in elevation on the way out there.

My guidebook recommended it, but it sounded like a standard sort of indoor art gallery. You know me and art. I decided to pass. Maybe the next time I’m in Hakone. As if.

At the Hakone Open-Air Museum

As suggested in the introduction, the Hakone Open-Air Museum is an art gallery, primarily with sculptures, that is, not to put too fine a point on it, as the name suggests, mostly in the open air. The scenery is magnificent.

The museum is set on the side of a forested mountain that is surrounded by more forested mountains. It takes your breath away. I don’t know where it takes your breath to, but while it’s gone, someone cleans and presses it and then returns it to your lungs as good as new.

There was a brilliant temporary exhibition at the Hakone Open Air Museum when I was there. The exhibit was sponsored by Mother Nature and Autumn. The leaves on the trees were changing colour. It was dazzling. There were burnt orange trees, but also some vivid oranges and reds.

When I was in Tokyo, only a few of the trees had some non-green colours on their leaves. Even then, it was only tinges of colour. Hakone is up in the mountains. The temperature here has been such that I’m comfortable in a long-sleeved shirt and a relatively light jacket. But it is cooler than in Tokyo. That probably accounts for the earlier fall colours.

Because I’ve mentioned the scenery, let’s jump ahead a bit to one specific piece of art at the Hakone Open-Air Museum. It’s called the Symphonic Sculpture.

The Symphonic Sculpture is a large cylinder, the equivalent of maybe three storeys tall and perhaps an upscale living room width, but cylindrical. On top, there’s an observation deck. To get there, I walked up a spiral staircase inside the stained glass cylinder.

The stained glass, with the light from outside, such as it was*, pouring through the glass, was beautiful enough, but the view from the observation deck was … well, let’s just say my breath was taken away and cleaned again.

(*Today was another completely overcast day.)

As I’ve already described, the views were resplendent. The hills were alive with, well, there was no singing Julie Andrews there, but it was glorious.

Most of the art at Hakone Open-Air Museum is on large terraced plateaus on the mountainside. Some of the sculptures sit on concrete plazas, and some on lawns. Visitors can’t walk on the grass, so I couldn’t get right up to the latter pieces. But I could for the pieces on concrete.

I took a video from a single spot on the grounds of the Hakone Open-Air Museum. From that spot, I pivoted probably something like 270 degrees, so you can get a sense of that one small part of the museum.

Warning: In the past, I rarely took videos. I still don’t take many. My inexperience shows in the quality, or rather lack thereof, of the video. Nevertheless, I suggest you watch it as an introduction before I move on. (Yeah, yeah. I know. I’ve already included some pictures so you wouldn’t get bored. So, the video is not really an introduction. But, work with me, people.)

Okay. I admit that it’s not great, but it’s less than two minutes. Are you so busy that you can’t waste less than two minutes of your life? Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you before I continue the narrative.

(I can’t control the size of the embedded video. I don’t know if this is the case for your browser, but when I watch the video as it is embedded in this post, the video width fills most of the page width, which cuts off the top and/or bottom of the video. Clicking the full-screen icon on the video resolves that issue. Then, when you’re finished watching, do whatever you have to do to get out of full-screen mode when you’re done. On a computer, that’s the escape key.)

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? What? It was? That’s two minutes of your life that you’ll never get back. Sorry about that.

The sculptures in the museum were by artists from around the world, including some Japanese sculptors. I didn’t look at all of the placards by the sculptures, but I think that most of the artists represented are no longer among the living.

I think that there were only two sculptors who were represented by more than one or two pieces at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle and Henry Moore.

There were several different styles of sculptures. The Henry Moore pieces were typical Henry Moore abstracts. There were also a few other abstract pieces, including one kinetic piece. But there were also very human forms, typically nudes, some mythological characters, and some purely whimsical pieces, including two super-sized sunny-side-up eggs that people used as a bench.

Other Outdoor Pieces at the Hakone Open-Air Museum

Indoor Artwork at the Hakone Open-Air Museum

Not all of the artwork is outdoors. There are two buildings with art inside. One has two rooms. I don’t know if the exhibits in those rooms were temporary or permanent.

One room contained art from just one sculptor, Giacomo Manzù, an Italian artist who lived from 1908 to 1991. Most of his works were relief sculptures hanging on the wall. But there’s one more three-dimensional piece that I pictured here.

The other room in that building was titled “Masterpieces.” I’m not sure why. To my taste, they weren’t masterpieces. I photographed only one piece in that room. It was a mirrored, curvy form hanging on the wall. I chose to photograph that one because, Tada …

Okay. I admit it. I can be very childish at times. The only reason I included a picture of that piece is that the artist’s name is Minami Tada. This allowed me to say “because, Tada” above.

Picasso Gallery

I’m reasonably certain that the contents of the other building form a permanent exhibition. There’s a giant sign, seemingly permanently affixed to one of the outside walls of the building. It says simply, “Picasso.” Most of the pieces inside are by Picasso.

I say most because the first piece that struck my eye upon entering the gallery was a large tapestry (I thought, at first, it was a painting on fabric, but I didn’t think so after reading the sign beside it) hanging on one of the walls. I looked at it, and I didn’t think Picasso painted like that often. Most of the people in the painting had body parts in the right places and in reasonably correct proportions.

Then I looked at the placard next to the painting. The primary reason it didn’t look like a Picasso piece to me was that it wasn’t. It was by a Belgian, Yvette Cauquil-Prince (1928-2005). The sign said that, “Yvette Cauquil-Prince opened a tapestry studio in Paris in 1959, where she worked with many of the major artists of the 20th century, such as Braque, Chagall and Ernst. She also won Picasso’s complete trust, and while he was still alive, she produced numerous tapestries for him.”

The other pieces in the Picasso gallery were all by Picasso. At least, the ones for which I looked at the associated placard were. The works included some sculptures, paintings, and ceramics.

Wait. Did Picasso do ceramics? I’m such an ignorant person, although ever so slightly less ignorant now.

Oh, damn. I almost forgot something. I intentionally put off mentioning it until the end because I wanted it to be a surprise. But then I came dangerously close to leaving it out. I remembered it only as I was about to push the “Publish” button.

It’s this. There’s a nice little pond at the Hakone Open Air Museum. A couple of red, abstract sculptures perch in it. There are also some fish swimming around in the pond. No, they’re not perches. Most of them are big, fat, colourful carp. There are also some small, grey fish that almost blend in with the water. I don’t know what type of fish they are.

Aren’t you glad I remembered that and you stuck around until the end of this post? You’re welcome for all the fish.

Having spent the whole morning at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, I had lunch in one of its restaurants to fuel me up for my afternoon activities, which will come to you in a subsequent post.