Phoenix Hall under the Burning Sun

Held in the Uehara Museum of Modern Art in Shimoda, Shizuoka, Phoenix Hall under the Burning Sun (Enten no Hōōdō, 1953) is Suda Kunitarō's principal late treatment of the Byōdōin Phoenix Hall at Uji, the eleventh-century Pure Land temple founded by Fujiwara no Yorimichi in 1053 and one of the most celebrated surviving monuments of Heian Buddhist architecture. Suda views the hall frontally across its reflecting pond, but instead of the cool, melancholic atmosphere in which the building is conventionally rendered, he depicts it at the height of summer in a blazing white-gold light that bleaches the long tile roof and the projecting wing corridors into a thin, almost spectral silhouette. The pond and the deep shadow under the eaves are rendered in a dense oxide-red and umber, and the whole composition is built around the harsh tonal contrast between the dissolved upper register and the dark weight of the lower. The picture belongs to the postwar sequence of architectural canvases in which Suda turned to the great religious monuments of Heian and Nara Japan as subjects through which to extend the dark Spanish manner he had brought back from Madrid three decades earlier, and it is among the most concentrated of his late works.