Museum*

10 April 2010
Today we took a train to Kurashiki – we’re certainly getting as much travel as we can from our JR Passes – a place about 25km west of Okayama across a fertile plain with numerous small vegetable gardens. They all had onions, garlic, varieties of broccoli, peas and broad beans growing (it was a slow train so we were able to have a good look)and it made us think of our allotments back home and hope that all our crops of those vegetables are doing well after such a terrible winter. There are also numerous citrus trees in the area, at the moment all covered with fruit including huge grapefruit and a vast variety of oranges which reminded us of the sad news we had earlier that our lemon tree didn’t survive the winter.
Kurashiki has a small enclave of old black and white houses clustered around a willow (and cherry blossom) lined canal where carp, swans and herons live. The houses and buildings were originally built as merchants’ homes and storehouses from when the town was an important centre for rice and the reeds used to thatch roofs. A very pleasant and relaxing place with numerous ceramics galleries selling the locally produced Bizen-yaki pottery and once again the pieces we really liked were beyond our price range.

But none of this was the reason for our going to Kurashiki – we had come to visit the Ohara Museum Of Art. This galley was founded by textile tycoon Ohara Magosauro to house his collection of western art – he had asked his friend Kojima Taorajiro to tour Europe in the 1920s and buy paintings for him; other paintings were added later. Walking around the galleries was rather like a whizz through the history of art with each painter being represented by one, sometimes two, not very memorable painting or sculpture, so there are works by Cézanne, El Greco, Gauguin, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Matisse, Miro, Monet, Ben Nicholson, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Rodin and Warhol, as well as many other, less famous, western artists. All very enjoyable but, once again not our real reason for visiting – this came next in the Craft Art Gallery.
This is housed in attractive quadrangle of converted storehouses and contains works by four potters who were prime movers in the revival of mingei folk crafts in Japan. The collection is stunning; the four potters are Hamada Shoji, Bernard Leach, Kawai Kanjiro and Tomimoto Kenkichi. Each potter is represented by between 60 and 100 pieces, each housed in their own room and most of them are masterpieces. This visit to a small, fairly unknown museum in a small, fairly unknown town in Japan will go down as one of the highlights of our r-t-w journey which is now rapidly drawing to a close.