Ginza Bacchus wine bar

Depicts the frontage or interior of a Western-style wine bar in Tokyo's Ginza district, taking its name from the Roman god of wine. The subject captures Ginza's cosmopolitan character in the 1920s and 1930s, when European fashions, food and entertainments concentrated along its streets. Kazuma's treatment likely emphasises signage, illuminated frontages and the geometry of contemporary architecture — territory closer to French poster art than to Edo-period meisho-e. The mokuhanga medium handles flat planes of colour and firm outline well, complementing the graphic vocabulary that Western bars and cafés themselves used in their advertising. Within Kazuma's oeuvre Ginza Bacchus reads as a pointed record of Taishō and early Shōwa modan culture and the Westernisation he had absorbed first-hand through his study of Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec and the wider French lithographic tradition during his training in oil painting and printmaking.