Despite being rather uncultured when it comes to art and science, I consider myself to be someone who visits museums and art galleries around Ueno fairly often. Yet, for some reason, I’ve always felt distant from the most prominent one, the National Museum of Western Art. It’s been decades since my last visit—or perhaps this was actually my first time.
I went to see the Impressionist Exhibition: Stories Around the Room, featuring works from the Musée d’Orsay.
I was worried it might be incredibly crowded, so I went cautiously. Luckily, perhaps because it was a weekday early in the new year, I didn’t even need to use the blue traffic cones set up to manage the line in the museum’s front garden. I was able to enter smoothly and quickly—what a lucky break!
Several “photography permitted” spots were set up, making it well worth bringing my LUMIX GF10.
While it was relatively empty, there was always a crowd in front of every exhibit, and pieces with the camera-OK sign were even more strictly guarded. Let’s embrace the challenge of “photographing famous works through the crowd.”
Degas “Family Portrait”
Renoir “Two Girls Playing the Piano”
Bartolomé “In the Greenhouse”
Hmm, just my personal opinion, but it’s not bad. Since amateur snapshots can’t possibly capture artworks with high precision anyway, this kind of approach feels more appropriate for “I went to an art exhibition” photos. If you want to see the paintings, you can just buy the catalog (though I skimped and didn’t buy it this time lol).
The era when Impressionist painters flourished was apparently a time of rapid modernization and industrialization, when the values and lifestyles of European society underwent major shifts. Within that context, the exhibition offered a focus on savoring the artists’ gaze and brushwork directed not at “landscapes,” but at ‘people’ and “customs” within interiors. It was an exhibition I, uneducated as I am, found quite enjoyable.
Among the many non-photographable works, two family portraits particularly stuck with me.
Munch’s “The Sick Child” (despite being a composed painting unlike “The Scream”) had an unsettling feel, while Bénard’s “A Family” conveyed a sense of “something about to move in the next instant” – both resonated deeply with my mood that day.
And so, that was my trip to the National Museum of Western Art.
