Matsumoto Shunsuke

Matsumoto Shunsuke (松本竣介, 1912-1948) was the conscience of Japanese modernism during the catastrophe of the Pacific War — a yōga (Western-style) painter whose tight, slate-blue urban landscapes, montage compositions of anonymous city figures, and stoic late self-portraits constitute one of the most morally serious bodies of work produced anywhere in wartime Asia. Profoundly deaf since the age of thirteen, the holder of one of the war's few public dissents against the militarist ideology that swept the official art world, and dead at thirty-six from heart failure aggravated by tuberculosis and the deprivations of the war years, Matsumoto has come to occupy a singular place in the postwar Japanese canon: at once a major modernist painter of the city, a documentary witness to the look and feel of Tokyo and Yokohama on the eve of their destruction, and a kind of secular saint of the wartime intelligentsia. The Iwate Museum of Art in his adopted home prefecture maintains the principal monographic collection of his work, and major holdings at the Miyagi Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art Kamakura and Hayama, the Mie and Fukushima Prefectural museums, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Okawa Museum of Art together preserve a near-complete record of an oeuvre that, despite its brevity, is among the most coherent and distinctive in twentieth-century Japanese painting.

Matsumoto was born Satō Shunsuke on 19 April 1912 in Shibuya, Tokyo, the second son of a businessman with roots in the northern prefecture of Iwate. In 1914, before his second birthday, the family moved north to Hanamaki in Iwate, the town immortalised in the poetry of Miyazawa Kenji, and Matsumoto grew up in the small mountain city of Morioka where his father had established a business. The defining catastrophe of his childhood came in 1925, when he was thirteen and entering middle school: an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis left him entirely and permanently deaf. The illness ended his hopes of a conventional academic career and, in the long Taishō tradition of intellectually bookish young men shunted toward art by physical impairment, turned him toward painting and toward the literature of artistic vocation. The decisive impetus came in 1927, when his elder brother Sato Hisashi — already an aspiring critic and writer — sent him a complete set of oil-painting tools and the technical primer of the time. From that point on, the deaf provincial schoolboy painted constantly, taught himself the rudiments of oil painting from books and reproductions, and conceived of art as a calling that would compensate for the silence in which he was condemned to live.

In 1929, at the age of seventeen, Matsumoto left Iwate for Tokyo to pursue a painter's training. He enrolled at the Taiheiyō Gakai (Pacific Painting Association) Research Institute, the long-running private academy founded by Meiji-era yōga painters, where he studied under Suda Kunitarō and absorbed the school's mixture of plein-air, French-trained realism and the more austere, drawing-based discipline that would mark his mature work. In 1930 he was admitted to the Taiheiyō Gakai's main exhibition, where he showed a small portrait, and in the years that followed he exhibited steadily with the Taiheiyō and at smaller progressive societies in Tokyo. By the mid-1930s he had married Matsumoto Teiko, the daughter of a publisher named Matsumoto in whose household he was lodging; on his marriage he was adopted into the Matsumoto family and took the surname by which he would be known. The Matsumotos had a son, Wataru, who would later become a documentary film-maker. Through his wife and her family Matsumoto entered into a circle of writers, editors and small magazine publishers, and in 1935 he founded with friends the little magazine Zakkichō (雑記帳), which published essays, fiction and reproductions of contemporary art and which carried Matsumoto's first major published writings on painting.

The 1937 Suburban Landscape (郊外), exhibited at the twenty-fourth Nika Exhibition in the autumn of that year, marks the moment at which Matsumoto's mature painting first announces itself. The composition draws together a bare hillside, a few low industrial buildings, a strip of foreground field and a band of pale sky into a montage of overlapping planes; the colour is reduced to a restrained palette of slate blues, dusty ochres and pale chalk whites, and the surface is built up in dry, scraped strokes that lay bare the texture of the board on which the picture is painted. The painting was acquired in due course by the Miyagi Museum of Art, one of the principal institutional collections of his work, and inaugurated the suburban-edge-of-the-city subject — the marginal industrial fringe of an expanding Tokyo, viewed with neither nostalgia nor enthusiasm — that would remain one of his central preoccupations.

From 1939 to 1942 Matsumoto produced the great cycle of cityscapes and street scenes for which he is principally remembered. Cityscape (街, September 1940), On the Street (街にて, September 1940), Landscape in Blue (青の風景, September 1940), Backside of Tokyo Station (駅の裏, January 1942) and Station (駅, January 1942) belong together as a sustained meditation on the Tokyo and Yokohama of the wartime years: anonymous pedestrians cross deserted boulevards, the brick-and-zinc backs of railway stations rise behind empty squares, low industrial buildings flank streets devoid of motor traffic, and the entire scene is bathed in the cold, recessive blue light that became his signature. The painter Tagawa Suiho would later call this the 'blue period' of Matsumoto's painting, and the critic Asahi Akira would identify in these canvases a montage method — drawn from his early reading of Soviet film theory and from the photo-magazine culture of the 1930s — in which figures from different locations and times are recombined onto a single unified picture surface. The technical handling is consistently dry and inscribed: contours are firmly drawn, the modelling is held to broad zones of tonal value, and the brushwork resembles drawing as much as painting. The paintings are at once topographically exact — the Marunouchi district, the streets behind Tokyo Station, the bridges and shop fronts of working-class Yokohama — and pictorially abstract, the entire city reduced to a set of planes, rectangles and quiet, half-glimpsed figures.

In September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, Matsumoto produced his most famous public statement: an essay titled 'Ikiteiru gaka' (生きている画家, 'A Living Painter') published in the December issue of the magazine Mizue. The essay was a measured but unmistakable rebuttal to the militarist art critic and Imperial Army Ministry advisor Suzuki Kuraji, who had argued that Japanese painters must henceforth abandon individualism and place their art at the direct service of the war effort. Matsumoto's response — that a painter remains a living, individual conscience, that the work of art belongs to the longer time of culture rather than to the immediate utility of the state, and that even in war the painter's first obligation is to the integrity of his own vision — is one of the very few public dissents recorded in the Japanese art world during the war years. It earned Matsumoto a brief notoriety, the surveillance of the Special Higher Police (Tokkō), and a moral authority that the postwar Japanese art world has not since taken away from him. The major paintings of late 1941 and 1942 — Portrait of the Artist (画家の像, August 1941, Miyagi Museum of Art), Self-Portrait (自画像, October 1941, MoMA Kamakura and Hayama), Standing Figure (立てる像, 1942, MoMA Kamakura and Hayama), Portrait of a Woman (婦人像, January 1942, Okawa Museum of Art), Nikolai Cathedral (ニコライ堂, c. 1941, Miyagi Museum of Art) — are inseparable from this public stand. Portrait of the Artist in particular, an almost full-length self-portrait submitted to the twenty-eighth Nika in September 1941 in the same months as the Mizue essay, has come to be read as the visual companion to the essay: the painter stands frontally, brush in hand, against the slate-blue ground of his city, gaze direct and unmoving, declaring the unillustrated dignity of an individual conscience.

The paintings of 1942 and 1943 — Standing Figure, Backside of Tokyo Station, Station, Factory (工場, 1942), the great Bridge in Y-City (Y市の橋, 1943) and the multi-figure montage Five People (5人, 1943) — extend and deepen the wartime vocabulary. Bridge in Y-City, the second of four canvases bearing the same title and the most often reproduced of them, depicts a steel railway bridge in Yokohama (the 'Y' of the title) crossing an industrial canal at sunset; the brick warehouses, the iron lattice of the bridge and the small, half-erased figures crossing toward the picture's left edge are rendered in a saturated palette of slate blues, browns and dusky reds that move the late wartime work toward a darker, more layered tonal register. Five People, exhibited at the Shingin (新人) Painting Association in 1943, is the most complex of the wartime montages — five anonymous figures from different locations and social positions assembled onto a single picture plane in front of a fragmented urban backdrop — and one of the great Japanese paintings of the war years. Throughout this period Matsumoto continued to paint outdoors in increasingly difficult conditions: paint, board and canvas became scarce, deafness made the air-raid sirens of the late war an abstraction he could only see, and the tuberculosis and asthma he had contracted in his youth advanced steadily. He nevertheless went on working until the final months, and a small group of late 1947-48 canvases — the cubist-inflected Sketch (素描), the late Suburban Landscape variants and the Saint with a Painter compositions — show him still revising the vocabulary of his urban painting in the last year of his life.

Matsumoto died on 8 June 1948 in his Tokyo home of heart failure aggravated by tuberculosis and bronchial asthma. He was thirty-six. He had survived the war, but the long years of malnutrition and overwork had broken his constitution, and the postwar reconstruction he had hoped to paint barely began before his death. The posthumous reception was almost immediate: his widow Teiko, his brother Sato Hisashi, and the network of writers and editors around the prewar magazine Zakkichō organised memorial exhibitions, gathered his correspondence and essays, and began the long work of canon formation that would gather pace through the 1960s. The Iwate Museum of Art — the institution closest to the Hanamaki and Morioka of his youth — built the most concentrated single collection of his work, and the Miyagi Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art Kamakura and Hayama, the Mie and Fukushima Prefectural museums, the Okawa Museum of Art in Kiryū, and the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT) hold the principal further holdings. A major Iwate retrospective in 2012 marked the centenary of his birth; further retrospectives at the Asahi Group Oyamazaki Villa Museum of Art and at MOMAT have continued to consolidate his reputation as one of the most original and morally serious of all twentieth-century Japanese painters and as one of the very few prewar yōga painters whose work passes unbroken from the Taishō ferment, through the wartime catastrophe, to the postwar reconstruction without yielding to militarist ideology. His brother Sato Hisashi published a long memoir of him in 1955; his son Matsumoto Wataru's documentary work in the 1970s and 1980s preserved a rich photographic and oral record. The painted record itself — sober, deafened, observed at the painter's deliberate distance from the noise of his time — has come, more than seventy years after his death, to seem one of the indispensable documents of Japanese modernism.