Ancient Bronzes

Held in the Nakano Museum of Art in Nara, Ancient Bronzes (Kodō) is among the still-life canvases through which Suda Kunitarō extended the dark, tonally controlled European manner that he had brought back from his four years at the Prado into a uniquely Japanese sensibility. The composition gathers several archaic Chinese ritual bronze vessels — vessels of the kind preserved in the Shōsōin and in the Kyoto temple treasuries that Suda knew intimately — on a plain ground, and renders them in a closely keyed palette of brown-black, oxide red and warm umber, with the highlights restricted to the rims and the projecting handles. The frontal placement, the unornamented ground and the dense tonal weight all draw openly on the Spanish bodegón tradition of Sánchez Cotán and Zurbarán that Suda had studied in Madrid, but the choice of subject — vessels saturated with Buddhist and Chinese-classical association — translates the European still-life mode into a meditation on the East Asian sense of the contemplative ritual object. Together with the Violin of 1933, the canvas stands among the central documents of Suda's still-life practice and of the cultural translation that he placed at the heart of his work.