Factory

Painted in 1942 and held by the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, Factory (工場) is one of the most concentrated of Matsumoto Shunsuke's wartime industrial paintings and one of the small canvases in which the dry, inscribed handling of the 'blue period' cityscapes is applied to a tightly framed industrial subject. The composition is a single section of a factory roofline — the angular silhouette of saw-tooth windows, a chimney rising into the upper register, the dusty brown wall of the building filling the foreground — laid out across a small board approximately forty-one by thirty-two centimetres. The colour is held to slate blues, dusty browns and chalk whites, and the surface is built up in the dry, scraped strokes that became his signature. Industrial subjects had occupied Matsumoto since the suburban paintings of 1937, but the 1942 Factory belongs already to the war years, when the industrial fringe of Tokyo was being mobilised for war production at an unprecedented scale, and the painting is among the most quietly observant of his wartime documents.