Gas Lamp and Advertisements

Painted in 1927 and held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), Gas Lamp and Advertisements is one of the largest and most ambitious of Saeki Yūzō's second-Paris canvases. The composition is dominated by a single wrought-iron gas lamp standing in the centre foreground, behind which a section of street wall opens up to display layered painted advertisements and shop signs — the layered tissue of script and image that Saeki had come to read as the true subject of the Paris street. The horizontal format (65 by 100 cm) extends the wall across the entire canvas, and the lamppost punctuates that horizontal field with a single vertical accent. The colour is reduced to a restrained palette of greys and umbers, with a few bright accents in the painted lettering, and the handling is uniformly dry and inscribed; the lettering on the advertisements is laid down with the calligraphic deliberation that distinguishes the late Paris cycle. As one of the largest of his Paris canvases and as one of the few major works in a Japanese national collection, Gas Lamp and Advertisements has become a touchstone for the postwar reassessment of Saeki's reputation.