Self-Portrait, a Standing Posture

Painted later in 1924 in the months following the encounter with Maurice de Vlaminck at Auvers-sur-Oise, Self-Portrait, a Standing Posture is the first major canvas that records Saeki Yūzō's break with the modulated plein-air manner of his Tokyo training and his discovery of the harder, contoured, more graphic painting that would define his mature work. The artist is shown full-length, palette in hand, against the bare interior of a Montparnasse studio, but the painting has been rebuilt around the linear armature that Vlaminck's criticism had demanded: contours are firmly drawn in black, the modelling of the face and clothes is reduced to broad zones of tonal value, and the brush has begun to leave the dry, inscribed mark — closer to drawing than to oil painting — that became his signature. The 1925 cycle of Paris street scenes would not have been possible without the breakthrough recorded here. The painting is held by the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, which preserves the largest institutional collection of Saeki's work.