Station

Painted in January 1942 and exhibited at Matsumoto Shunsuke's second solo exhibition that same month, Station (駅) is the smaller of the two canvases on station subjects produced for that show and one of the most concentrated of his early wartime cityscapes. The composition is a tight view of a Tokyo or Yokohama suburban platform: the iron canopy of the station roof rises across the upper register, the empty platform stretches across the foreground, and two small anonymous figures stand half-erased at the centre of the picture. The colour is held to the cold slate blues, dusty browns and chalk whites of the 'blue period' canvases, and the handling is uniformly dry and inscribed, with contours firmly drawn and the modelling reduced to broad zones of tonal value. The empty, half-deserted station — at a moment when Japanese railways had been almost entirely turned over to military traffic — has come, in retrospect, to be read as one of the most concentrated of Matsumoto's quiet wartime documents. The painting is held by the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art.