Landscape, Urabandai

Painted in the summer of 1935 in the highland country of Urabandai in Fukushima, Landscape, Urabandai (Urabandai fūkei) is the principal canvas of a working campaign that Yasui Sōtarō pursued in the Urabandai plateau north of Mount Bandai in the year of his election to the Imperial Art Academy. The horizontal oil shows the rounded volcanic ridges and dark stands of birch and beech that close the landscape against the high-altitude sky of the Fukushima uplands, with the composition built on the same constructive parallel-stroke handling that Yasui had developed from Cézanne and used to such severe effect in the great portraits of the early 1930s. The reduced palette of slate-green, ochre and chalky grey, the firm contour drawing of the ridgelines, and the patient construction of the picture from a small number of carefully weighted masses make the Urabandai canvas the formal counterpart to the contemporaneous portraits — the Cézannist analysis of the figure carried out into the landscape — and the work is one of the central documents of Yasui's mid-1930s mountain painting.