The Raidō at the Tōshōdaiji Temple

Held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, The Raidō at the Tōshōdaiji Temple (Tōshōdaiji Raidō, 1933) is the breakthrough painting of Suda Kunitarō's career and the work that established him as the leading representative of a Kansai alternative to the bright Tokyo manner of yōga. The large canvas depicts the raidō (worship hall) of the eighth-century Tōshōdaiji, the Nara temple founded by the Chinese master Ganjin in 759 and one of the great surviving monuments of Tang-style Buddhist architecture in Japan. Suda views the building frontally, in a deep raking light that turns the wooden columns and the tiled roof into massive geometric solids, and renders the whole composition in a closely-keyed palette of oxide red, umber, slate black and warm grey that openly draws on Velázquez's late palette and on the dark earth-colour tradition of the Spanish Baroque. The painting was shown at the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai (Independent Art Society) exhibition of 1934 immediately after Suda's election as a member, and its severe architectural weight and tonal seriousness were widely recognised as a new direction in Japanese oil painting — a deliberate Kansai counter to the bright Kuroda-school plein-air manner then dominant in Tokyo.