Eggplants

Eggplants (Nasu, 1930) is one of the iconic still-life subjects of twentieth-century nihonga and is regularly cited in Japanese art-historical surveys as the moment at which Kokei's late style — pared, slightly chilly, infinitely patient — was definitively achieved. The composition shows three deep purple-black eggplants laid out against a pale silk ground, with the green calyx of each fruit accented in a slightly cooler tone and the long curve of each body outlined in a single unhurried line. Kokei pays particular attention to the slight differences of weight and posture among the three fruits; they sit on no surface, cast no shadow, and have no companion vegetation, and yet the spatial relationship between them is precisely judged. The work entered the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) at an early date and has been continuously held up since its first exhibition at the Inten of 1930 as a model of how the kachō tradition of Edo-period painting could be carried, intact and entirely modern, into mid-century Shōwa nihonga.