Suburban Landscape

Exhibited at the twenty-fourth Nika Exhibition in the autumn of 1937, Suburban Landscape (郊外) is the first of Matsumoto Shunsuke's mature paintings and the canvas in which his recognisable manner — montage composition, restrained palette, dry inscribed surface — first decisively emerges. The composition draws together a bare hillside, a few low industrial buildings on the middle ground, a strip of foreground field and a band of pale sky into a layered structure of overlapping planes; the colour is reduced to slate blues, dusty ochres and pale chalk whites, and the surface is built up in dry, scraped strokes that lay bare the texture of the board on which the picture is painted. The subject — the marginal industrial fringe of the rapidly expanding interwar Tokyo, viewed with neither nostalgia nor enthusiasm — would become one of Matsumoto's central preoccupations and recur in different keys for the rest of his life. The painting was acquired in due course by the Miyagi Museum of Art, one of the principal institutional collections of his work, where it serves as the touchstone for the suburban-edge cycle that occupied him through the late 1930s.