A Bar

A Bar (酒売り場) is a 53.5 × 65.5 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1927 and exhibited at the 14th Nikakai Exhibition in Tokyo the same year. The composition is a view of the interior of a working-class drinking establishment of the kind Hasegawa frequented in the Tabata, Reiganjima, and Asakusa districts of north and east Tokyo — a long wooden counter set against a wall lined with sake bottles, with figures of customers and the bar mistress massed into the dense, hot interior. The painting is rendered with the rapid, slashing application of oil that became Hasegawa's signature, in a Fauvist palette of saturated red, ochre, viridian, and Prussian blue. There is almost no academic figure-construction: the bodies are summarized in broad strokes of color, the faces compressed into masks of paint, and the whole composition held together by Hasegawa's nervous, almost graphic line. A Bar belongs to the early Nikakai paintings — alongside Beer Hall, A Way to a Viaduct, and An Italian Violinist of the same year — that established his reputation as one of the most distinctive of the younger Tokyo yōga painters and that opened the long cycle of bar, café, and entertainment-district interiors that occupied him through the 1930s. The painting is in the collection of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.