Self-Portrait

Painted in October 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor and two months after the great Portrait of the Artist exhibited at the twenty-eighth Nika, this small Self-Portrait (自画像) on board is one of the most intimate of Matsumoto Shunsuke's surviving self-portraits. The format is restrained — a head-and-shoulders view at thirty-three by twenty-three centimetres — and the handling is uniformly dry and inscribed, with contours firmly drawn and the modelling held to broad zones of slate blue, dusty ochre and chalk white. The painting belongs to the same months as Matsumoto's famous Mizue essay 'A Living Painter' (生きている画家), the public rebuttal to militarist art critic Suzuki Kuraji that earned him the surveillance of the Special Higher Police and his subsequent moral authority within the postwar Japanese art world. The unflinching frontality of the painter's gaze and the deliberate restraint of the surface have come, in retrospect, to seem visual companions to the essay's argument for the painter's continuing individual conscience. The painting is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, one of the most important institutional collections of his work.