Gate with Advertisements

Painted in 1925 in Paris and held by the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Gate with Advertisements is one of Saeki Yūzō's earliest sustained engagements with the motif that would dominate the late paintings of 1927-28: the wall or hoarding covered in painted advertisements and posters, treated less as an urban incident than as a vertical field for Saeki's calligraphic brush. The composition is concentrated on a closed wooden gate or shutter in the wall of a Paris building, the surface entirely given over to layers of painted lettering — shop names, theatre announcements, the routine inscriptions of the street — that Saeki transcribes with the slow deliberation of a calligrapher copying out a sutra. The painting marks the moment at which the lettering of his Paris environment, which had begun as one element of the larger 1925 cycle, became an autonomous pictorial subject; the subsequent obsession with posters, hoardings and the Cinzano signs of the 1927-28 cycle is anticipated here in concentrated form.