The Bauhaus Manifesto, which begins with the phrase: “The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building!”, was published about 100 years ago by Walter Gropius, an architect and the first director of the Bauhaus school. The Manifesto declares the spirit of searching for a new form by taking various arts such as painting, sculpture and architecture comprehensively.

The painter MATSUMOTO Shunsuke (1912-1948) made many works based on urban spaces and buildings as motifs, so much that he even said that buildings were his “hobby”. Indeed, his first work to have been selected for an exhibition as an artist was also Building (1935, 22nd Nika Exhibition).This work composes the stateliness of the forest of buildings in a clear manner with a characteristic of thick lines and matière of paint applied in layers, reminding us of the style of Georges Rouault. Although his painting style changed over the years, structures such as buildings and bridges remained a lifelong motif. This attachment reminded me of Gropius’ words. MATSUMOTO’s paintings are full of attempts to unravel the various elements within architecture – the aesthetic aspects of form and colour, and the structural aspects of materials and techniques – with his own hands as a painter, and to capture the essence of forms.

MATSUMOTO was born in Tokyo in 1912, but moved to Iwate when he was 2 years old for his father’s work, and lived there until he was 17 and moved to Tokyo. MATSUMOTO’s career as a painter coincided with the unsettled social climate of the 1930s going through the Great Depression to World War II. MATSUMOTO, who lost his hearing at the age of 13, was in Tokyo when the war ended. While seeing his friends off to war, MATSUMOTO himself was determined not to leave Tokyo, despite the potential of danger, and kept an eye on the changing face of life. He devoted himself not only to painting but also writing, but the deprivations of the war and subsequent period plus his prolific activities became too much for him, and he died suddenly in 1948 at the age of 36.

Matsumoto Shunsuke: A Centennial Retrospective held in 2012 was a large-scale retrospective exhibition which toured 5 cities across Japan and elaborately introduced his paintings with abundant documentations. The exhibition hall was heated up by the overwhelming number of exhibits, but there was a somewhat tranquil atmosphere. I was also one of the visitors who frequented the exhibition rooms. I was given an unforgettable impression by the energetic setup of the exhibition, which seemed to bring to life the figure of the artist himself (the 4 cm-thick exhibition catalogue still has a strong presence on my bookshelf).

Building (c.1947, collection of Mie Prefectural Art Museum) pictured here is one of his final works. In this work, free and spontaneous black lines express a building-like frame on the brownish surface of the painting (*). In the post-war period, MATSUMOTO’s works became increasingly abstract, often consisting of brown ground and black lines. The use of brown as a ground colour is due to the fact that he resumed his creative activities with the brown paints he buried in his garden during the war, and the black lines reflect his self-confessed temperament. Even before this, there had been a striking approach to the line in works such as Cityscape  and Composition series, based on his own specific style which included transferring line drawings on paper to the base for oil paintings. His post-war “lines”, however, do not have the restrained impression seen in the earlier works. There is a free-flowing almost doodling-like quality, which conveys the joy of drawing and its underlying strength.

When MATSUMOTO draws a landscape, the electric poles and iron bridges standing on the ground are replaced by black silhouettes on coloured surfaces and are broken down from the real structures into just one element that makes up the picture. What kind of future did he foresee for painting within the integration of various approaches from drawing lines, creating coloured surfaces, and scraping paint off the surface with a palette knife? Looking at this work, I can’t help but fantasise about the space beyond that final exhibition room, which never existed.

KONNO Saki
Curator
Tohoku Fukushi University Serizawa Keisuke Art and Craft Museum

Translation :Naoko Mabon (WAGON)

* In recent research with X-ray photography, it was found that one of his most important works, Bridge in Y-City, was drawn on the lower layer of this work (from 15 January 2007 article of The Mainichi Newspaper [Mie local edition]) titled “Prefectural Art Museum: one of the most important works by MATSUMOTO Shunsuke Bridge in Y-City is found underneath the Building from the museum collection – X-ray investigation”).

Reference
• SUEMATSU Masaki, “Gendai furansu kaiga – senji chu no ugoki (Modern French Painting: Movement During the War),” in Mizue (No.482, September), Nihon Bijutsu Shuppan, 1946
• ASAHI Akira, Matsumoto Shunsuke, Nichido Shuppan, 1977
• MATSUMOTO Shunsuke, Ningen fukei (Human Scenery), Chuo Koron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1990
• Shunsuke Matsumoto: 50 years later exhibition catalogue, edited by Nerima Art Museum [and others], Kyodo News, 1998
• NAKANO Jun, Aoi enogu no nioi (The Smell of Blue Paint), Chuokoron-Shinsha, 1999
• Matsumoto Shunsuke: A Centennial Retrospective exhibition catalogue, edited by Iwate Museum of Art [and others], NHK Planet Tohoku, NHK Promotions, 2012

Image caption
MATSUMOTO Shunsuke, Building
c. 1947, 37.9 x 45.5 cm, oil on board
Mie Prefectural Art Museum
Image courtesy of Mie Prefectural Art Museum