Butterflies Flying above Clouds

Butterflies Flying above Clouds (雲の上を飛ぶ蝶) is a 91.5 × 60.6 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934 and now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The painting shows a small group of butterflies arranged in patterned flight across a luminous, pale-blue ground that reads as both sky and abstract space, with no horizon and no clear scale — a composition that pushes Migishi's late-1934 surrealist iconography toward its most fully dematerialized form. The painting belongs to the celebrated final sequence of butterfly compositions produced after the artist's spring 1934 visit to the entomologist Ino Genshirō in Tokushima Prefecture, and it represents one of the most ambitious of the Tokyo MoMA's holdings of early-Shōwa yōga. Together with the same museum's 1929 Clown Boy, it bookends Migishi's career and shows the extraordinary distance the artist had traveled in the five years between the densely worked, dark-toned clown paintings of the late 1920s and the open, high-keyed butterfly paintings of his final months. The painting was exhibited posthumously at the fourth Dokuritsuten in November 1934 as part of the memorial group of his last works and entered the Tokyo MoMA collection in the postwar period.