A Shell and Butterflies

A Shell and Butterflies (貝殻と蝶) is a small 24.3 × 33.4 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934, the final year of his life, and now in the collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art, Hokkaidō. The painting belongs to the celebrated final sequence of shell and butterfly compositions that Migishi produced during and after his spring 1934 visit to the entomologist Ino Genshirō in Tokushima Prefecture, where he made an extended study of butterflies in flight and at rest. The composition arranges a single conch-like shell at lower right and a small group of butterflies in flight against an open, pale-toned ground — an iconography of detached natural fragments suspended in an infinite, Tanguy-like horizon that has no clear analog in Japanese painting of the previous decade. The small format and the openness of the ground are deliberate inversions of the dense, dark interiors of his clown paintings of the late 1920s, and the painting reads as one of the most fully realized surrealist works produced in Japan to that date. It was exhibited posthumously at the fourth Dokuritsuten in November 1934 as part of a memorial group of his final paintings, and it entered the founding collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art when the prefectural museum opened in 1967.