Kobe City Koiso Memorial Museum of Art
Some exhibitions
in Japan have a way about them in springing the most wonderful artistic
discoveries upon you through revealing artists that are sublimely beautiful by
the way they create artworks that the word painter doesn’t seem to do them
justice. I am not sure what to call such artists but they sit not in a kind of
academic or academy hierarchical system but like poets of colour,
line and form operating way out from the avant-garde boundary riders only
to be introduced into art world once they've left this planet and my guess is
that is the only way this particular type of artist can exist is alone, ignored
and mostly impoverished.
Such artwork discoveries within outstandingly curated exhibitions like the
aforementioned titled one above are one of my great joys of going to museums
where those faraway, tucked away, stunning images by outsider artists but seen
a remembered by scholarly curators are bought into the public memory, its bliss
and this show there is many to be seen.
The title of this
exhibition is wonderful Pictures of Twilight that time
of the day where long or momentary reflections take place as one gazes slightly
skyward towards the horizon at the shifting nuances of the heavenly hues
transforming into themselves into nocturne, this societal memory appears to be
a universal moment, common to all peoples and if this show is anything to go
recorded by its artists and poets.
For example,
there is one smallish post card size water colour work in this exhibition by
OSHITA Toijiro 1870 -1911 titled: Setting Sun n.d. 9.1
x 14.2 cm, it is a stunning example of grand small scale beauty of the artist's
evening gaze out across a water-way towards the setting sun, its poetry in
painting with an immediacy due to the size of the work and how that limits the
influence of delay in praxis, the paper is imbued with delicately laid floods
water colour in the evening lights of yellow ochres, merging into light purple
magenta hues downwards and outwards towards the horizon with a contrast of
a low key tan purple distance landscape across the water as a boat gently
drifts over the glassy magenta, grey, purple, olive-yellow aquatic stretch with
a coral-red setting sun flickering off the water as the vessel sails though it
into the nocturne, it’s a wonderful sensory experience to witness in paint.
Then there is the
woodblock prints of KAWASE Hasui1883 – 1957 especially his image Twelve
Scenes of Tokyo, Dusk at Kiba, 1920, 36.3 x 24.2 cm again the beautiful
hues of evening reflecting on a glassy river silhouetting the growing urban heavy
industrial terrain of Tokyo, its working-class beauty.
Other surprises
in this show were some of the more obscure European works that were on show
especially Alfred SISLEY’S painting titled: Riverside Reeds at
Sunset stunning image and he must be one of most under-rated
painters of all the impressionists and there is another great small painting on
exhibit by John CONSTABLE titled: Trees on Hampstead Heath at Sunset, oil
on paper mounted on canvas, 25.2 x 29.2 cm, these are just a few of the amazing
array of wonderful images within this exhibition and if you're in Osaka or Kobe
make sure you get to this exhibition at
