From the 1930s to the post-World War II period, Matsumoto Shunsuke created many lyrical landscapes and figure paintings, intelligently devised. He applied his studies of the classic art of both the East and West to create a technique for painting tranquil, carefully thought out, paintings with a sense of transparency. With his wife Teiko he published the monthly magazine Zakkicho, which carried ambitious essays, and continued to question what the nature of the artist, often at the mercy of his times, should be.
In the early 1930s, influenced by Rouault, Modigliani, and Grosz, he worked on montage-like urban scenes in blues and browns. In the 1940s, as the war intensified, he repeatedly painted favorite scenes in Tokyo and Yokohama in dark, quiet palettes.
This work is thought to depict a waste disposal facility near Shimbashi, in Tokyo, and the Horaibashi Bridge over the canal there. The canal was filled in in the 1960s, but “Horaibashi” survives as a place name. Canals were one of Matsumoto’s favorite subjects in that period. This painting speaks eloquently of the oppressive atmosphere and social constraint near the end of the war, while the delicate combination of horizontal and vertical lines formed by the bridge girders, buildings, and electric poles gives the painting a sense of depth. It includes almost no human figures; that may truly express the nature of human lives at that time. This painting was shown in April, 1943, at the first Shinjin Gakai, organized by Aimitsu, Aso Saburo, Terada Masaaki, and Inoue Chozaburo.