Bridge in Y-City

Painted in 1943 and held by The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), Bridge in Y-City (Y市の橋) is the second of four canvases bearing the same title and the most often reproduced of them; it is one of the most famous of all Matsumoto Shunsuke's paintings and the principal touchstone of his wartime cityscape cycle. The 'Y' of the title is Yokohama, and the bridge is a steel railway bridge crossing an industrial canal at sunset on the city's working waterfront. Brick warehouses flank the bridge on either side, the iron lattice of the structure rises into the upper register of the canvas, and a small group of half-erased figures crosses toward the picture's left edge. The colour has moved beyond the cold slate blues of the 1940-42 'blue period' canvases into a saturated palette of slate blues, dusty browns and warmer reds and umbers — a darker, more layered tonal register that characterises the late wartime work. The painting was exhibited at the Shingin (新人) Painting Association in November 1943 and has come, in the postwar canon, to function as one of the principal visual documents of wartime Yokohama and as one of the central images of mid-century Japanese modernist painting.