Sea and Oblique Light

Sea and Oblique Light (海と斜光) is a 72.8 × 60.8 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934 and now in the collection of the Nagoya City Art Museum. The painting shows an open seascape — a low horizon, an empty foreground, a band of slanting light cutting diagonally across the picture — with a single small natural fragment (shell, butterfly, or driftwood) at the lower edge of the composition. The work belongs to the small group of luminous, frankly surrealist seascapes that Migishi produced in 1934, alongside Sea and Light (Fukuoka) and Loneliness on Journey, and it represents the most reductive end of his late style: the dense pattern, the populated grounds, and the costumed figures of the clown years have given way to a near-empty surface organized by the play of light against an open horizon. The composition reads as a direct response to the metaphysical landscapes of Yves Tanguy that had begun to arrive in Tokyo through the late-1920s surrealist journals, and it represents one of the most fully realized surrealist works produced in Japan to that date. The painting entered the Nagoya City Art Museum collection in the postwar period and is one of three Migishi paintings in the museum's holdings.