@article{oai:tobunken.repo.nii.ac.jp:00006124,
 author = {村上, 博哉 and Murakami, Hiroya},
 issue = {383},
 journal = {美術研究, The bijutsu kenkyu : the journal of art studies},
 month = {Aug},
 note = {The goal of this two-part essay is to consider the meaning of four large (size 100) figural paintings created by Matsumoto Shunsuke (1912-1948), namely Portrait of the Artist (1941), Standing Figure (1942), Five People (1943), and Three People (1943).
     Directly after his death in 1948, Matsumoto's April 1941 article, “A Living Painter” [Ikiteiru gaka], published in the arts magazine Mizue immediately before Pearl Harbor and Japan's entry into World War II, was noted as an expression of his opposition to Fascism. Matsumoto became a posthumous hero as “an opposition painter.” Portrait of the Artist and Standing Figure are both full-figure self-portraits that have been linked directly to the text of “A Living Painter” and heralded as “anti-Fascist paintings” in the more than 50 years since Matsumoto's death. On the other hand, Five People and Three People, both painted in 1943, have been almost completely unnoticed. When discussed, they are simply noted as portraits of the artist's family during the war.
     Two of the works, Five People and Three People, can be seen as a pair. From that point of view, these four paintings make up three works, each of the three works depicting a full-scale view of Matsumoto. It is noteworthy, because fullscale self-portraits are relatively rare in the history of art, that Matsumoto created one full-scale self-portrait each year for three consecutive years. This essay will show that this series of works forms a clear triptych. The subject of the triptych is “self,” and the three works are related in a dialectical construct. In other words, if Portrait of the Artist is the thesis, then Standing Figure can be seen as a contrasting antithesis. Five People and Three People provide the synthesis of that contrasting pair.
     The fiction of the “opposition painter” is nothing more than a myth created by the post-war Japanese art world. The real motivation behind Matsumoto's creation of the triptych can be interpreted as the artist's own psychological problems that dated from experiences in his childhood. Matsumoto came down with epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis when he was 12 years old, and was in danger of losing his mental capabilities to the disease. In the end his intellect was not affected by the disease, but the trauma of the experience remained in his heart. He was deeply frightened by having narrowly escaped loss of his mental faculties, and thereafter sought to suppress that fear by ceaselessly forging his own intelligence. However, from the end of 1939 through the beginning of the following year, a young boy
known as Kiyoshi (Yamashita Kiyoshi, 1922-1971) living at the time in a handicapped children's facility, became famous for collages he created. The highest-ranking artists of the day praised Kiyoshi, and in that environment, Matsumoto's hidden fears came to the surface. Matsumoto underwent violent internal upheavals during this period of Kiyoshi's. Two of the texts written by Matsumoto in February 1940 apparently allude to Kiyoshi in a negative fashion, unconsciously reflecting the unease Kiyoshi's mental handicap aroused in Matsumoto. Around the same time, Matsumoto's painting expression began to shift from “black line work” to “mass” forms, and this too can be seen as his psychological workings, with his rational mind attempting to suppress the irrational elements of his art. However, Matsumoto became fully aware of the fact that hiding one's fears from oneself was not a fundamental solution to the problem. From this realization, he set himself to work on the creation of the triptych as a way for him to fully address, and resolve for himself, the problems lying at the depths of his heart.},
 pages = {34--50},
 title = {自己イメージの弁証法（上）―松本竣介《画家の像》、《立てる像》、《五人》《三人》の解読―},
 year = {2004}
}