The Hakone Open-Air Museum was founded in 1969 as an outdoor art museum that would give people the opportunity to encounter great sculpture in a natural setting. It’s different than museums, that I used to visit before. The museum’s mission is to promote sculpture as an environmental art and most objects are placed outside in surroundings of lush greenery. Collection includes 120 masterpieces by famous modern and contemporary sculptors and five indoor exhibitions.

At first, I visited the closest building from the entry, called Main Gallery. Inside, there are pictures of sculputes displayed outside, but actually they look much different, than in real. Probably images of sculptures depend on techniques used by photographers. It’s really interesting to comparise the real sculputes with photographies and notice the differences. Before I came to this museum, I had been wondering, why all theese sculptures are outside. The reason is, that sculptures displayed in the background of green grass look much better than it would look on the indoor exhibition. My favourite was sculpture of the big face. It looks like a face laid on the surface of pond horizontally and instead of hair, it is covered by plants and small branches. The next interesting thing was ‘Curved Space’ for children, who could go inside the object and walk through the long tunnels. During observing children, adults were watching geometric construction of the building. After that, I saw a big sculpture of small human figures, that looked like dozens of sportsmen. All the figures are connected in the one sculpture, that looks really impressive.

The next on my route was ‘Symphonic Sculpture’, that is a high and long building with many stained glass windows. When I had walked up the stairs, I went outside on the observation deck. Sculptures of the museum and greenery created really awesome view from there. Moreover, leaves already started to change colors and it’s turning red and yellow. Hovever, the most surprising of the museum was ‘Picasso Pavilon’. I didn’t expect, that museum famous for outside sculptures, has as many Picasso’s works. I think that it’s definietly the greatest boast of the museum, because there are 300 Picasso pieces in the world-class collection there. Besides paintings, there are sketches, painted plates and photographies of Picasso’s private life.

Summary

Alhough The Hakone Open-air Museum is very big object, walking all around is not very tiring. Watching sculptures during a walk in the surroundings of lush green is really relaxing and nice experiance. I’m sure, that everyone will like this place so much. Even if you’re not interested in art or if you travel with small children, you should definietly come there!

Weronika Golubska

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* This article was written by a trainee from overseas. Please note that there might be spelling and grammar mistakes.