Azekura (Log Storehouse)

Held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Azekura (校倉, 1943) is one of two canvases that Suda Kunitarō devoted in the same year to the eighth-century Shōsōin imperial storehouse at the Tōdaiji in Nara, the great triangular-log timber treasury that has preserved Emperor Shōmu's Tang-dynasty regalia since the 750s. The painting depicts the building obliquely, with the characteristic stacked timber walls (azekura-zukuri construction) running diagonally across the picture's middle ground and rising into the steeply pitched roof. Suda renders the whole in a closely keyed palette of warm umber, oxide red and slate black, the brushwork dense and deliberate, the light raking from the upper left in a manner that draws directly on the dark tonality of Spanish Baroque painting. Painted at the height of the Pacific War, when the great Nara monuments had taken on an explicitly national significance for Suda's generation, the picture is at once a documentary record of a particular eighth-century building and a meditation on architecture as the bearer of cultural memory, and it stands among the principal documents of the dark, architecturally grounded Kansai yōga of the war years.