This post dedicated to the great artist That Guy

I promised to tell you about the art museum, and here I am telling you. Sorry it took so long. There's been a bit of confusion, which I wanted to resolve before I told you about this. But here it's been a week and it's not resolved yet. So you can just be confused with me.

We drove three hours straight up the interstate to get there. Well actually Cory drove, I navigated and Heather sat in the back seat providing moral support. Do to my mother's map reading lessons when I was a little girl we only got lost once in the streets right next to the museum. You know how it is - you can see the building but where's the parking lot?

Outside, the Tokyo-Fuji Art Museum looked like any other museum in the world. It was square and the engineers had used a lot of glass in the design. A nude, tribal chieftain looking woman stood almost as tall as the building near the old entrance.

We went around to the new entrance. This was easy to do because though none of us speak anything you would call passable Japanese, just riding the train a couple of times teaches you the Kanji for enter and exit. Inside we found a two story glass room dwarfing a single desk on one side and opening into a small cafe on the other.

Since Heather and I had skipped breakfast we opted to put our stomachs before art. I had a salad made with red beans and lotus root. Lotus root looks like a lacy tuber and tastes like a peanuty potato. I highly recommend trying it if you ever get the chance.

Having eaten, we bought tickets, 1000 yen each and ascended up the amazing magical escalator to the second floor. At first we were confused by the escalator. Heather nudged me and said, "Escalator now stairs" but it turned on when we got close - motion sensitive.

We jilted the permanent exhibit to go look at the feature exhibit first. It was called Happy Mother, Happy Children, and that's all I know about it because the rest of the ad was in Japanese. A series of long winding galleries was filled with paintings, sculpture and photographs all depicting children or women with children.

The first gallery was filled with Western art, the kind of stuff you could see in the states. I saw a Mary Cassat and a Renoir. Most were mounted behind a wall of glass, which held me at least three feet from any given painting. Also I kept having to shoo my own reflection out of the art. Very annoying.

After that first gallery we found a lot of Asian art. This was more like it. I could see Cassat at home but I had never seen The Wind by Tsutomo Fuji. It was a large painting of a girl in a purple and white western style dress. She was kneeling on a rock against a gray background. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted. Her hair blew in the wind. Looking at her I could almost feel the wind in my own hair. It was the best piece in the whole exhibit.

But the real pay-off came when we moved on to the permanent exhibit. There were eight small galleries - two with only one piece of art each. But it took us a long time to make it through. The first couple were the usual bible scenes and portraits of ancient dead people. Those are nice, but not my favorite. Then in gallery 5 we found our first bit of amazing.

Water Lillies, by Claude Monet painted 1908

We stared at it for a while, fascinated. Then I turned around. I could see from gallery 5 straight into gallery 6.

I was in the presence of an American icon. Is it art? Dunno. But it sure is American, so it struck me funny to see it hanging in a Japanese art museum. I'm talking about Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup can.

Then I saw a guy with an apple for a head. Here's where the confusion starts. When I saw the painting I thought "Holy crud! That's The Son of Man by Rene Magritte." Okay that's a lie, what I really thought was "Holy crud! It's the apple head guy." I didn't know the name of the art or the artist but I knew I'd seen it all over the place.

The painting was of a man in a suit. At least you have to assume he was a man. He had no neck and a large green apple floated in the place of his head. Now those of you who know The Son of Man well might be catching on to where the confusion came from.

I figured I could come home, look up 'apple head man' on Google images and find the artist and the title of the piece. Therefore, I didn't write it down at the museum. I wasn't supposed to be using a pen in their anyway. Art museums are scared of ink.

We continued through the rest of the exhibits. In Gallery 7 we found decades worth of prints from Robert Capa Gold Medalists. Capa was a famous photographer. The Happy Mother Happy Children exhibit included a photograph of Pablo Picasso and his son Claude that was taken by Capa. Gold medals are awarded to photographers who do "the best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise." The one that particularly caught my eye was the portrait of the afghan girl with the green eyes from the cover of National Geographic.

It was taken by Steve McCurry in 1985.

Okay, so we saw all this art. We drove two hours home. I get on my computer to write about this amazing art exhibit. Half way through writing the post I come to the part about the apple head man. I look up the painting to find the artist. I find the painting, but it's not the same.

Confusion sets in.

Rene Magritte's apple head man is a painting of a man wearing a suit and bowler hat. He most definitely has a head. The floating apple merely obscures his face rather than replacing his whole head. Which begs the question, what the heck did I see at the Tokyo-Fuji museum of art?

First I thought maybe it was still a Magritte, you know, same idea, different painting. After all, Monet did lots of Water Lily paintings. But as far as I could tell Magritte had never painted apple head man, only son of man.

I tried the museum web site. I had a lot of trouble navigating the Japanese version and the English version was sparse, the current exhibits page was under construction.

So if anyone can tell me who painted the apple head man and what the real title is I would be eternally grateful. Otherwise I'll just have to wait until I can get another ride to the museum.

I leave you today with these words from Edmond de Goncourt "A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."