Marionette

Marionette (マリオネット) is an 80 × 65 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1930 and now in the collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art, Hokkaidō. The work shows a marionette-puppet figure — stiff-limbed, costumed in patterned diamond cloth, blank-faced — suspended against a flat dark ground, with no visible strings but the body posed in the slightly disjointed equilibrium of a hanging puppet. The painting continues the clown-and-performer iconography that Migishi had opened with the 1929 Clown Boy, but the introduction of the marionette as a substitute for the human figure marks a step toward the more frankly fantastic, anti-realist imagery that would define his final period. Marionettes and dolls were a standard motif in late-1920s European modernist painting (compare De Chirico's mannequins, Schad's still-life puppets, and the Bauhaus puppet productions), and Migishi's treatment shows him working that European vocabulary into a Japanese-modernist register through the patterned costume and the strongly tonal ground. The painting was exhibited at the seventh Nikaten and entered the founding collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art when it opened in 1967.