Flying Butterfly

Flying Butterfly (飛ぶ蝶) is a 118 × 81 cm oil on board painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934 and now in the collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art, Hokkaidō. The painting shows a single butterfly suspended in flight against an open, pale-toned ground, with the patterned wings reduced to a near-symmetrical heraldic emblem at the center of the composition. The image is one of the most simplified and frankly surrealist of Migishi's final-year butterfly paintings — the elimination of any horizon, foreground, or accompanying motif gives the painting a quality of pure iconography that has no parallel in Japanese painting of the preceding decade. The work belongs to the sequence of paintings produced during and after the artist's spring 1934 visit to the entomologist Ino Genshirō in Tokushima Prefecture, where Migishi made the extended observational studies of butterfly anatomy and flight that fed the final paintings. It was exhibited posthumously at the fourth Dokuritsuten in November 1934 as part of the memorial group of his last compositions, and like A Shell and Butterflies it entered the founding collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art when the prefectural museum opened in Sapporo in 1967.