ART LOVER

I first heard about the Bridgestone Museum back in college.

I was an English major, but a brief half semester with an alcoholic “Bible as Literature” professor once had me considering a switch to Art History. I dropped the class instead, and stayed the course.

So I put the Bridgestone on our itinerary for this trip, and in doing some research I discovered just how deep are the treads of my own ignorance: I never realized that Bridgestone Tire is a Japanese company. The founder’s name was Ishibashi, or “stone bridge”…

It’s a relatively small museum, located in the Bridgestone headquarters, amongst an accumulation of nondescript concrete midrises. We went on a quiet weekday morning, but word is that the foot traffic in the museum is rarely heavy.

The general focus of the collection is on Impressionism/Post-Impressionism, and many of the key players are represented by two or three paintings. The lack of a crowd allows for a leisurely pace—Lana told me somewhat breathlessly that I had spent 117 seconds looking at a Renoir. Which in 11-year-old art-museum time is like 3 hours…

The kids were eager to move on to the Pokemon Center, so we only clocked about an hour and a half total in the museum, but it was a morning well spent.