Sea and Light

Sea and Light (海と光) is a large 162 × 130.8 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934 and now in the collection of the Fukuoka Art Museum. It is the largest of the artist's late-1934 seascapes and the most ambitious of his surviving surrealist compositions: a luminous open sea organized around a single band of slanting light that cuts the picture surface from upper left to lower right, with the smallest natural fragments — a shell, a butterfly form — placed at the edges as anchor points in an otherwise empty space. The work belongs to the celebrated sequence of late-1934 seascapes produced after the artist's spring visit to the entomologist Ino Genshirō in Tokushima Prefecture, and at this scale the surrealist vocabulary of unmoored fragments against infinite ground is given its fullest treatment in Migishi's catalogue. The painting represents Japanese yōga at the moment of its closest convergence with the French surrealism of Tanguy and the early Dalí, but with a tonal sobriety and luminous, almost watercolor-like handling that is distinct to Migishi. The work entered the Fukuoka Art Museum collection in the postwar period and was reproduced as a centerpiece in the 2000 exhibition Japanese Art in the 20th Century at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.