Twilight

Twilight (薄暮, Hakubo), an oil on canvas dated 1938 and now in the Miyagi Museum of Art in Sendai, is among the small number of late paintings Yanase Masamu produced during the most politically constrained years of his career, after his 1932 arrest and torture by the Special Higher Police for suspected violation of the Peace Preservation Law and his enforced retreat from open proletarian publication. The picture is modest in scale (31.8 by 41 centimetres), and the format itself is significant: by the mid-1930s Yanase had returned cautiously to easel painting, the medium he had publicly disavowed a decade earlier as a bourgeois activity, partly because political graphics had become legally dangerous and partly because oil painting offered a private channel for the visual thinking he could no longer make public. The composition is a half-lit interior or twilight landscape rendered in a muted palette of slate blue, ochre, and faded rose, the forms loosely brushed and the tonal range deliberately compressed in a way that recalls both the late nineteenth-century Tonalists and the contemporaneous Yōga (Western-style) painting of his Tokyo peers. There is none of the angular avant-garde aggression of his Mavo work or the political directness of the Yomiuri Shimbun cartoons; the painting reads as a quiet, almost melancholic study of fading light, made in a year when Japan was at full war in China and when public criticism of the regime had become unsustainable. The work is reproduced in the 2008 volume 州之内徹が盗んでも自分のものにしたかった絵 (ISBN 978-4-7630-0732-2), a survey of paintings the critic Sunouchi Tōru wished he could have stolen for his own collection, and it survives in the Miyagi Museum of Art as part of that institution's holdings of interwar Japanese modernism. Yanase would be killed seven years later in the Yamanote air raid on Shinjuku Station on 25 May 1945, and Twilight is therefore one of relatively few oils to survive both the war and the wider destruction of his studio materials, lending the picture an additional valedictory weight that its quiet surface only partly conceals.