Cordonnerie (Shoemaker's)

Cordonnerie (Shoemaker's), painted in Paris in 1925 during the most productive months of Saeki Yūzō's first French stay, is one of the canonical paintings of the 1925 cycle and one of the two canvases that won acceptance at that year's Salon d'Automne. The composition is a shop front on a working-class side street: a flat plane of grey-ochre plaster wall, a single doorway, the shop's lettered sign — CORDONNERIE — laid in across the upper third of the canvas in a hand whose calligraphic deliberation is unmistakable in any reproduction. The painting compresses everything that would become characteristic of Saeki's mature Paris manner: the inscription of script as pictorial element, the rejection of atmospheric modulation in favour of a hard, dry surface, the love of zinc and plaster and weathered paint, and the underlying debt to Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo, both of whom he had been studying with the absorption of a convert. Cordonnerie is held in the Ishibashi Foundation collection at the Ishibashi Museum of Art in Kurume, the principal Kyushu seat of the foundation's modern Japanese painting holdings.