~ Picasso and Henry Moore ~ Inside and Out ~ Outside In ~

Turn left when you get off the train and with a little walking you'll see the Ticket Office. Different priced tickets for the members of your family, depending on how many days and years you have been wandering around this planet where sometimes you can get a sense of normality. You're not going to get that here.

Chokoka no mori museum is both an indoor and an outside art museum. Once you have successfully navigated your way through the ticket gate, down the long escalator, a little bit of inside building that curves you around to the outside pathway that takes you down to the stone building with PICASSO in giant black almost forbidding letters. Here, like the many who came before you and like the many who will in time follow you, most people feel an irresistible urge to take seemingly incessant unceasing photos of one another....

Then there it is. The entrance to the Henry Moore wide open park that leads you to the stone clad Piccasso museum. Don't worry about getting lost. It is not that big inside despite its omnipresent presence when first confronted by it from the outside.

In the indoor museum you are now within it is as quiet as has been waiting with a mixture of paintings and pieces, and a gallery of photos of Picasso that try to give a sense of the man as he was working at his art and at various stages of production of the artwork. There is a long series of his paintings of his lady as he fails to finish any of them because I guess she herself in her life was not finished with it yet.

There is very little explanation in English throughout the Piccaso museum but if there was ever a contest of artists whose works can just speak for themselves, then only a collection of art critics would be so banal as to try to not include Picasso.

The souvenir shop and food stall seem to have been modelled after the unfinished and sense of imperfection Picasso was being at one with.

And then you leave the museum and the trees, flowers and plants have taken on new life as you have passed through the timeless time you have just spent.

Both Moore and PIcasso knew how to release expectations of how form and shape really relate to one another. There is no contrast so..., no need to use words like, "contrast", "comparison", or "juxtaposition". This is not the first exhibition to choose to put the works of Moore and Picasso together.

Moore's sculptures and warm and tender. As hard and seemingly unyielding the materials he sculptured in, a sense of compassion, grace and curiosity flow naturally between the sculptures and the humane people who connect with them for a while. Personally I love some of Picasso's paintings, but they were not many of them that remarkable that day. And once some while ago I regarded Moore's creations as lumps of rocks and things. For me Moore takes us back to the nature from which the modern world has hewn us away from..

Shinjuku Odakyu Line straight all the way to Hakone Yumoto Station, which is the terminus. Then from the next platform zig-zac up the Tozan Densha. (Tozan Train) get off at the station with the same name as Chokoka no Mori.