Black Obi

Black Obi (Kuroi obi, 1915) is among Okada Saburōsuke's most celebrated paintings and is the work most often cited to demonstrate his characteristic synthesis of Raphaël Collin's outdoor-light academic manner with Japanese kimono culture. The composition shows a kimono-clad young woman seated on a Western-style garden bench, her hands resting in her lap, the wide black silk obi at her waist anchoring the picture in a single dense field of black against which the patterned silk of her kimono and the soft greens of the garden behind her come forward in cool, slightly purplish light. The painting was first exhibited at the ninth Bunten in 1915 and was immediately recognized as a definitive statement of Okada's mature style, with its faithfully observed textile and its very Collin-like staging of a single figure against outdoor shrubbery. The Artizon Museum (formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art) holds the canvas as one of the cornerstones of its Japanese Western-style painting collection. The high-resolution reproduction now available through Google Arts & Culture and Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Obi_-_Saburōsuke_Okada_(1915).jpg) preserves the rich contrast between the deep black of the obi and hair and the soft purples of the shaded ground that the artist used to give the picture its quietly chromatic structure. For students of Okada Saburōsuke and of early twentieth-century yōga more broadly, Black Obi is the painting in which his teacher's manner and his sitter's culture are most fully fused.