Composition (Still Life with a Fireplace)

Composition (Still Life with a Fireplace) (構図（暖炉のある静物）) is a small 46 × 33.5 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1933 and now in the collection of the Nagoya City Art Museum. The painting arranges a tightly packed group of still-life objects — a bouquet of flowers, fruit, and the angled mass of a domestic fireplace — into a flattened, compressed composition that uses pattern, silhouette, and saturated color rather than illusionistic depth to organize the picture surface. The work belongs to the transitional moment in 1933 when Migishi was beginning to break with the dense, illustrative figural mode of his late-1920s clown paintings and to read the André Breton-Yves Tanguy-Salvador Dalí surrealism that had been arriving in Tokyo through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and the writings of Takiguchi Shūzō. The fireplace, an unusual European-architectural motif in a Japanese still life, signals Migishi's deliberate engagement with European modernist iconography, while the flattened patterning and the unmoored arrangement of objects look forward to the surrealist compositions of 1934. The painting entered the Nagoya City Art Museum collection in the postwar period and is one of three Migishi paintings in that collection, the others being the 1934 Sea and Oblique Light and a related still life.