Kubohachiman

Held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Kubohachiman (窪八幡, 1955) was the painting for which Suda Kunitarō received the Mainichi Shinbun Grand Art Prize and is the canvas through which his postwar reputation became fully national. The painting depicts the precincts of Kubohachiman Jinja, the Heian-period Hachiman shrine at Kubo in Yamanashi prefecture whose worship hall and pagoda were designated Important Cultural Properties in the late nineteenth century. Suda views the wooden hall obliquely from below, with the great tile roof and the projecting eaves filling the picture's upper two-thirds and the deeply shadowed ground sloping away beneath, and renders the whole composition in his characteristic late palette of oxide red, ash umber and warm slate-grey. The handling is freer than in the wartime architectural pictures: the surface is built up in dense, dragged strokes that leave the underpainting visible at the edges, and the great structure reads less as a documented building than as a presence imagined through Spanish chiaroscuro. The 1955 Mainichi prize cemented Suda's standing as the leading Kansai yōga painter of the postwar period, and the picture sits at the centre of his late work.