Tatsumaki (Tornado)

Tatsumaki (龍巻, 'Tornado' or 'Waterspout') is a 1933 painting by Kawabata Ryūshi held by the Ryūshi Memorial Museum (Ryūshi Kinenkan) in Ōta, Tokyo. The composition depicts a tornado-like waterspout twisting up from the sea, its dark spiraling form filling the vertical picture plane against a churning grey sky. The title carries a deliberate pun on the artist's own art name Ryūshi (literally 'dragon-child'), since tatsumaki in Japanese is written with the characters for 'dragon' and 'roll' and was traditionally imagined as a dragon ascending into clouds — a subject with long Buddhist and Daoist precedent in East Asian painting. Ryūshi treats the dragon-storm at full scale, in deep tonal pigments handled with the broad planar boldness that characterizes his mature work of the early 1930s, the period in which the Seiryūsha annual exhibitions had established him as the leading alternative voice to the official Inten establishment. The Ryūshi Memorial Museum was founded by the artist on the site of his studio in 1963 and is now operated by Ōta Ward; it holds the largest single concentration of his paintings.