Landscape

In 1910 a circle of young writers in Tokyo, among them Mushanokōji Saneatsu and Shiga Naoya, started a magazine called Shirakaba, the White Birch. Alongside fiction it printed reproductions of modern European art, Cézanne included, and its members wanted more than reproductions. They planned a Shirakaba Art Museum of their own and ran a large fundraising campaign to buy real works for it. This landscape is the painting that money bought. The magazine closed in 1923, and the museum was never built. In 1950, when the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki celebrated its 20th anniversary, Mushanokōji and Shiga were among the guests, and they placed the canvas there on permanent deposit, along with three small bronzes Rodin had sent the group in 1911. Much of the canvas is still bare, and the loose lines of the underdrawing show through the sky.