Matsumoto Shunsuke

Matsumoto Shunsuke (松本竃介, 1912–1948) was one of the most morally serious Japanese modernists of the Pacific War years — a yōga (Western-style) painter whose tight, slate-blue urban landscapes, montage compositions of anonymous city figures, and stoic late self-portraits form one of the most coherent bodies of work produced in wartime Japan. Profoundly deaf since the age of thirteen, 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 witness to the look and feel of Tokyo and Yokohama on the eve of their destruction, and a figure of unusual conscience in the wartime art world. The Iwate Museum of Art, in the prefecture where he grew up, maintains the principal collection of his work, with further major holdings at the Miyagi Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (MOMAT), and other public museums that together preserve a near-complete record of an oeuvre that, despite its brevity, is among the most distinctive in twentieth-century Japanese painting.

He was born Satō Shunsuke on 19 April 1912 in Shibuya, Tokyo, into a family with roots in the northern prefecture of Iwate. While he was still an infant the family moved back north, and Matsumoto grew up in the mountain city of Morioka. The defining catastrophe of his childhood came in 1925, when he was thirteen and about to enter Morioka Middle School: an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis left him permanently deaf. The illness ended his hopes of a conventional academic path and turned him toward painting. The decisive impetus came in 1927, when his elder brother Akira sent him a set of oil-painting tools; from that point the deaf provincial schoolboy painted constantly, teaching himself the rudiments of oil painting from books and reproductions and conceiving of art as a vocation that would answer the silence in which he lived.

In 1929, at the age of seventeen, Matsumoto left Iwate for Tokyo to train as a painter. He enrolled at the Taiheiō Gakai (Pacific Painting Association) Institute, the long-running private academy founded by Meiji-era yōga painters, where he studied under Tsuruta Gorō and formed lasting friendships with the painters Asō Saburō and Terada Masaaki. In February 1936 he married Teiko Matsumoto and took the Matsumoto surname by which he would be known. That same period drew him into a circle of writers, editors and small-magazine publishers, and in October 1936 he founded and edited the little magazine Zakkichō (雑記帳, “Miscellaneous Notes”), which published essays, fiction and reproductions of contemporary art and carried his first substantial writings on painting. The couple’s first son, Kan, was born in July 1939.

By the later 1930s Matsumoto’s mature painting had announced itself in 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. Works from his “outskirts” (郊外) theme draw 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 beneath.

From 1939 to 1942 Matsumoto produced the great cycle of cityscapes and street scenes for which he is principally remembered — among them the celebrated Cityscape / Street (街) canvases of around 1940. Together they form 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 — what has often been called his “blue period.” Critics have identified in these canvases a montage method, in which figures drawn from different locations and moments are recombined onto a single unified picture surface. The handling is consistently dry and inscribed: contours are firmly drawn, the modelling held to broad zones of tonal value, the brushwork resembling 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 city reduced to a set of planes, rectangles and quiet, half-glimpsed figures.

In April 1941 Matsumoto published his most famous public statement: an essay titled “Ikite iru gaka” (生きてゐる画家, “A Living Painter”) in the April issue of the magazine Mizue. It was written in response to a roundtable, “The National Defence State and Art — What Should Painters Do,” that had appeared in the January 1941 issue of the same magazine, in which officers of the Army Information Bureau argued that Japanese painters should abandon individualism and place their art at the direct service of the war effort. Matsumoto’s measured reply — that even under a wartime state the painter remains a living, individual conscience whose first obligation is to the integrity of his own vision — is remembered as one of the very few public defences of artistic independence recorded in the Japanese art world during the war years, and it lent him a moral authority the postwar art world has not since taken from him. The major paintings of 1941 and 1942 are inseparable from this stand. Portrait of the Artist (画家の像, 1941), an almost full-length self-portrait shown at the Nika exhibition of 1941 and now in the Miyagi Museum of Art, 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, his gaze direct and unmoving, declaring the dignity of an individual conscience.

The paintings of 1942 and 1943 extend and deepen this wartime vocabulary, culminating in the great Bridge in Y-City (Y市の橋, 1943). One of several versions Matsumoto painted under that title and the most often reproduced, it depicts a steel railway bridge crossing an industrial canal in Yokohama (the “Y” of the title); the brick warehouses, the iron lattice of the bridge and the small, half-erased figures crossing toward the picture’s edge are rendered in a saturated register of slate blues, browns and dusky reds, and the 1943 canvas is now in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In the spring of 1943 Matsumoto joined Inoue Chōzaburō, Aimitsu, Tsuruoka Masao, Terada Masaaki, Asō Saburō and other painters to found the Shinjin Gakai (新人画会, “New Artists’ Society”), whose first exhibition opened that April in a small Ginza gallery; Matsumoto showed several works there, among them Near the Iron Bridge (鉄橋付近) and Canal Landscape (運河風景). Throughout this period he continued to work in increasingly difficult conditions: paint, board and canvas grew 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 almost to the end.

Matsumoto died on 8 June 1948 at his home in Tokyo 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 had barely begun before his death. The posthumous reception was almost immediate: his widow Teiko and the network of writers and editors around him organised memorial exhibitions, gathered his correspondence and essays, and began the long work of canon formation that gathered pace through the following decades. The Iwate Museum of Art built the most concentrated single collection of his work, while the Miyagi Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, and other prefectural and municipal museums hold the principal further holdings. A major retrospective marking the centenary of his birth was held in 2012, and later retrospectives — including one at the Asahi Group Oyamazaki Villa Museum of Art — 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, toward the postwar reconstruction without yielding to militarist ideology. 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.