Tank Road

Tank Road (タンク街道) is an 80.8 × 61 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1930 and exhibited at the 17th Nikakai Exhibition in Tokyo the same year. The composition is one of Hasegawa's industrial-landscape paintings, a vertical view of a road running between gas storage tanks — most likely the gas-works district along the Sumida River in east Tokyo — with the great cylindrical volumes of the tanks rising into the upper register of the canvas and the road and low industrial buildings of the foreground rendered in a heavily worked palette of red, ochre, viridian, and Prussian blue. The vertical format and the dramatic perspective give the painting an almost architectural force unusual in Hasegawa's work, and the gas tanks themselves — emblems of the new industrial Tokyo of the 1920s — are rendered with the same painterly intensity he brought to bar interiors and café waitresses. Tank Road belongs with Tabata Substation (1923), A Way to a Viaduct (1927), Brewery (1928), and Storehouse in Reiganjima (1937) to the long cycle of industrial and infrastructural paintings that placed Hasegawa within the broader interwar European tendency of treating the new industrial landscape as a serious motif for modern painting. The artist's signature and date appear in the lower right corner. The painting is now in a private collection.