Standing Figure

Painted in 1942 and held by the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, Standing Figure (立てる像) is one of the largest of Matsumoto Shunsuke's wartime canvases and one of the most monumental figure paintings of his career. The composition is a single full-length standing figure — a clothed man in everyday dress, gaze directed frontally at the viewer — set against the slate-blue ground of the contemporary 'blue period' cityscapes. The format (162 by 130 cm) gives the figure the scale of a monumental portrait or icon, and the handling is uniformly dry and inscribed, with firm black contours and the modelling reduced to broad zones of slate blue, dusty brown and chalk white. The painting is sometimes read as a companion piece to the great Portrait of the Artist of August 1941, the larger and more famous painting it most closely resembles in scale and treatment, and it shares with that canvas the unflinching frontality and the moral seriousness that mark Matsumoto's best wartime work. It is one of the central paintings of his mature period and one of the principal works in the Kamakura collection.