Mount Yakedake

Held in the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Mount Yakedake (Yakedake, 1941) is among the wartime landscapes in which Yasui Sōtarō extended the Cézannist constructive method of his great pre-war portraits out into the high mountains of central Honshū. The small oil, 52 by 46 cm, shows the active volcano of Mount Yakedake in the Northern Japan Alps of Nagano prefecture, with the volcanic cone rising frontally in the centre of the picture and the dark conifer slopes built from the firm parallel-stroke modelling that Yasui had perfected in the 1930s. The palette is severely held to slate-blue, dull green, ochre and the chalky white of the snowfields, and the composition is reduced to the few constructive masses that the Cézannist sense of pictorial architecture allowed. The 1941 date — between Yasui's election to the Imperial Art Academy and his appointment to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts chair in 1944 — marks the painting as a wartime affirmation of the analytical realism that Yasui had spent two decades developing, and it is one of the central works of his late pre-war landscape painting.