On the Street

Exhibited at the Kigen 2600 commemorative art exhibition of October 1940 — the official cultural festival staged for the 2600th anniversary of the legendary founding of Japan, and one of the most heavily propagandised art exhibitions of the early war years — On the Street (街にて) is one of Matsumoto Shunsuke's most carefully composed wartime canvases. The painting is a large vertical view of a Tokyo street: tall buildings rising on either side, the pavement narrowing toward a distant railway crossing in the upper register, and three small anonymous figures placed along the foreground and middle ground at calculated intervals. The colour is reduced to the cold slate blues and dusty browns of the contemporary 'blue period' canvases, and the surface is built up in dry, scraped strokes. The fact that Matsumoto chose to submit a painting of this kind — a quiet, almost depopulated cityscape in cold colours — to an exhibition staged in celebration of imperial myth is one of the small instances of his characteristic quiet dissent, and the picture has come, in retrospect, to be read as one of the visual companions to his Mizue essay of the following year. The painting is held by the Shimonoseki City Art Museum on the southern tip of Honshū.