Portrait of the Artist

Submitted to the twenty-eighth Nika Exhibition in September 1941 — three months before Pearl Harbor and in the same season as Matsumoto Shunsuke's famous Mizue essay 'A Living Painter' (生きている画家) — Portrait of the Artist (画家の像) is the largest and most fully realised of his early-1940s self-portraits and the painting most often read as the visual companion to the essay's public dissent against militarist art ideology. The painter stands almost full-length against a slate-blue ground, brush in hand and gaze directed frontally at the viewer; the format (162 by 113 cm) gives the figure the scale of a monumental portrait, and the handling is uniformly dry and inscribed, with firm black contours and the modelling reduced to broad zones of tonal value. The colour is the cold slate blue of the contemporary 'blue period' cityscapes, the surface scraped and inscribed in the manner that became his signature. The painting was acquired in due course by the Miyagi Museum of Art, which holds one of the most important institutional collections of Matsumoto's work, and it has come to function in the postwar Japanese imagination as one of the principal images of the wartime intelligentsia's resistance to militarist cultural policy.