Five People

Painted in 1943 and exhibited at the Shingin (新人) Painting Association that same year, Five People (5人) is the most complex of Matsumoto Shunsuke's wartime montages and one of the great Japanese paintings of the war years. The composition assembles five anonymous figures from different locations and social positions — a woman, a young man, an elderly figure, and two further figures placed at varying distances — onto a single picture plane in front of a fragmented urban backdrop of brick walls, low industrial buildings and a half-glimpsed sky. The technique is the same montage method that critic Asahi Akira would later identify as the structural principle of Matsumoto's mature work: figures drawn from separate sources, separate observation contexts and separate moments are recombined onto a single unified picture surface. The colour is held to the slate blues, dusty browns and warmer umbers of the late wartime cycle, and the handling is uniformly dry and inscribed. The painting (162 by 130 cm) is among the largest of his wartime canvases and one of the most ambitious. It remains in a private collection but has been included in the major retrospectives and is one of the principal works in the standard catalogues of his oeuvre.