Backside of Tokyo Station

Exhibited at Matsumoto Shunsuke's second solo exhibition in January 1942, Backside of Tokyo Station (駅の裏) is one of the most often reproduced of his wartime cityscapes and one of the paintings in which the slate-blue tonality of the 1940-41 'blue period' canvases is carried into the early war years. The composition is a level view of the back of one of the great Tokyo railway stations — almost certainly the eastern, Yaesu side of the central Tokyo Station — with low brick service buildings, a stretch of pavement, a single passing figure and the iron lattice of the station roof rising into the cold sky. The colour is held to slate blues, dusty browns and a few warmer reds in the brickwork, and the surface is built up in the dry, scraped strokes that became Matsumoto's signature. The painting belongs to the small group of canvases produced for the January 1942 second solo exhibition — Station (駅), Portrait of a Woman (婦人像) and others — that mark the culmination of the early wartime cityscape cycle. It is held by the Mie Prefectural Museum of Art, one of the important regional institutional collections of his work.