Benesse Museum collec­tion

Published Categorised as Art & Design, Japan, Travel No Comments on Benesse Museum collec­tion

Benesse House on Naoshi­ma doesn’t allow photos of their modern art collec­tion, so here is a selec­tion of works I like by some artists I saw there. I though the space of the museum was wonder­ful, but the fact that there was no inform­a­tion about the artworks was a letdown. If you didn’t know much about modern art already, you might not have got much out of the visit, which is a bad thing for a museum, seeing as one of the main reas­ons to go is to learn new things.

Jean-Michel Basqui­at

Basqui­at was a rags-to-riches super-star in 80s New York, (includ­ing dating Madonna) until he sadly died of a heroin over­dose. His paint­ings are defin­itely even better appre­ci­ated in real life than in photo­graphs. They’re abso­lutely huge, and have all kinds of layers, differ­ent texture and hidden tiny images and texts hidden in them when seen in person.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly also makes huge canvases, but is instead the world’s premi­um scrib­bler. It’s defin­itely the kind of modern art that people scoff at and claim they could do them­selves in five minutes (but never actu­ally do). Some of his works are huge surfaces covered in hundreds of tiny scribbles, but the essen­tial thing is that he makes exactly the right scribbles that are express­ive but also some­how sooth­ing to the eye, which is far harder than it looks.

Yves Klein

Yves Klein inven­ted and paten­ted his own specif­ic colour of blue, which was then used on his own artworks, and as part of collec­tions recol­our­ing famous objects.

Richard Long

Richard Long makes work related to walk­ing and jour­neys in the land­scapes.

Shigeo Anzai

Japan­ese photo­graph­er Anzai special­ises in portraits and docu­ment­ary work of other artists at work, and also works in a genre called Mono-Ha, where the artist creates epehem­er­al juxta­pos­i­tions of natur­al and indus­tri­al objects.

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