Café Tabac

Painted in late 1927 during Saeki Yūzō's second Paris residency, Café Tabac is one of the canonical works of the late Paris cycle and one of the canvases in which his pictorial obsession with the lettered surfaces of the street reaches its most concentrated expression. The composition is a single shopfront — a corner Parisian café-tabac with its zinc bar, its lettered awning, the obligatory red rhombus that signals the licensed sale of tobacco — laid out horizontally across the canvas like a freize of script. The lettering is inscribed with the calligraphic confidence of a brush handler raised in a temple of the Jōdo Shinshū tradition; the colour is reduced to the muted ochres, greys and reds of the painted exterior, and the surface is built up in dry, scraped strokes that lay bare the canvas weave at every accent. The painting marks the moment at which the Paris street, for Saeki, becomes finally and completely an act of writing. It is in a private collection on long-term deposit at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka.