15th Arrondissement of Paris

Painted in 1925 and held by the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, 15th Arrondissement of Paris is one of the small but pivotal canvases of Saeki Yūzō's first Paris residency. The view is taken from a corner street in the 15th arrondissement, the same Vaugirard quartier where Saeki rented a studio in the rue du Château: a row of low buildings on the right, a stretch of pavement and a few passing figures on the left, the perspective drawing the eye into the middle distance. The colour is restrained — greys, browns, the chalky white of plaster — and the lettering of shop signs is inscribed across the canvas with the calligraphic certainty that had become Saeki's hallmark. The painting belongs to the small group of canonical 1925 canvases — Cordonnerie, Footpath of Rue du Château, Rue Brancion, Gate with Advertisements — through which Saeki first announced the mature Paris manner and which formed the core of the Asahi Shimbun fiftieth-anniversary retrospective of 1978. It is one of the principal works in the Nakanoshima collection.