Girl with Red Lips

Reproduced as plate 14 in Arishima Ikuma Gashū: Jinbutsu Shōzō-hen (Atelier-sha, Tokyo, 1932), Girl with Red Lips (赤い唇の少女) is a half-length oil portrait of a bob-haired adolescent girl shown half-length in dark-blue striped clothes against a heavily worked blue-grey ground. The title points to the work's chromatic focus: the painter has set a single saturated cinnabar accent at the mouth against a face otherwise painted in the cool, almost monochromatic register of slate-blue, grey-green and bone-white that runs through much of his later figure work. The composition is the most modern of the album's portraits — the figure pushed against the edge of the canvas, the eyes thinly drawn and slightly off-axis, the chest and shoulders cut at a tense diagonal — and shows Arishima's continued absorption of the simplified, slightly mannered female portrait that the École de Paris (Modigliani, Foujita, Pascin) was making fashionable in the 1920s. As one of the album's last figure plates it documents the maturing of Arishima's portrait practice well after his Cézannesque Paris years and into the more decoratively flattened idiom of his Nikakai period.