Cityscape

Cityscape (街), painted in September 1940 and held by the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, is one of the key documents of the so-called 'blue period' that occupied Matsumoto Shunsuke from 1939 through 1942 — the cycle of cool, slate-blue urban paintings on which his reputation principally rests. The composition is a level view down a Tokyo street: a row of low buildings on the right, the pavement and a single passing figure on the left, the perspective drawing the eye into the middle distance toward a distant railway crossing. The colour is held to greys, slate blues and dusty browns and laid down in dry, scraped strokes; the contours of buildings, signs and figures are firmly drawn in a thin black line that approaches the inscribed quality of drawing. The picture belongs to the small group of canonical 1940 canvases — On the Street, Landscape in Blue, the early Cityscape variants — in which Matsumoto first announced the wartime cityscape style that would define his reputation, and it was an immediate source for the suburban and station-side paintings of 1941-43 that followed.