Landscape in Blue

Painted in September 1940 in the same dense burst of work that produced Cityscape and On the Street, Landscape in Blue (青の風景) is the most concentrated of Matsumoto Shunsuke's 'blue period' paintings and the one in which the cold slate-blue tonality of the wartime cityscape cycle is taken to its most lyrical extreme. The composition is a level view across an industrial outskirt: low workshops and warehouses in the middle ground, a single chimney rising into the upper register, and the entire scene flooded with the cool blue light that the painter Tagawa Suihō would later identify as the hallmark of Matsumoto's mature work. The handling is dry and inscribed throughout, the colour held to a narrow range of slate blues, dusty browns and pale chalk whites. Two further paintings by Matsumoto bear the same title; this canvas, the principal of the three, remains in a private collection but has been included in the major retrospectives and is reproduced in the standard catalogues of the painter's work.