A White Horse and a Clown

A White Horse and a Clown (白馬と道化) is a small 40.5 × 27.3 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1932 and now in the collection of the Menard Art Museum in Komaki, Aichi Prefecture. The painting depicts a small clown figure positioned beside a white horse against a darkly toned ground — a composition that pairs the masked-performer iconography of the artist's late-1920s clown series with the introduction of an enigmatic animal subject, anticipating the unmoored fauna of his 1934 butterfly paintings. The clown wears the patterned, slightly diamond-cut costume that recurs in Migishi's performer paintings of the period, while the white horse is reduced to a simplified silhouette in the European Picasso-Cézanne tradition. The painting was made in the year that Migishi participated in the second Dokuritsuten exhibition (he had been one of the seven founding members of the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai in November 1930), and it sits at the transition from his densely worked figural mode of the clown years into the more open, surrealist compositions of 1933-1934. The work entered the Menard collection in the postwar period and is on display at the museum's Komaki facility.