Rue Brancion

Painted in October 1925 in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, Rue Brancion is one of the largest of Saeki Yūzō's first Paris cycle (approximately 73 by 98 cm) and one of the canvases through which he first established the back-street vocabulary that would define his mature painting. The composition is a single long, slightly oblique view of the street running down toward the Porte de Vanves: tall apartment houses on the right, the pavement and a single passing figure on the left, the perspective driving toward a remote vanishing point in the upper centre of the canvas. The colour is reduced to the dry greys, ochres and pale chalky whites that he had begun to favour, and the lettering of advertisements and shop signs is laid in with the calligraphic certainty that he had begun to use as a structural device. The painting belongs to the small group of major 1925 canvases — Cordonnerie, Footpath of Rue du Château, Gate with Advertisements — which together announce the arrival of Saeki's recognisable Paris manner. It was reproduced in the 1978 memorial exhibition catalogue published by the Asahi Shimbun, which remains the principal published source for his oeuvre.