Boy
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Artizon Museum |
Sekine Shoji's "Boy" is the last work before his tragic death at the age of 22 from tuberculosis. The painting shows a young boy wearing a kimono. It is considered that the subject of this painting is Sekine's brother, Takeo, who died at the age of six. On looking closely, the eyes of the boy in the painting seem to be melancholic, as if trying to find something in a distant view. This longing resonates with Sekine's desperate longing for life as his health deteriorated with the passing of time. Sekine struggled as an artist. He could not afford his art supplies and most of his works were lost to the Great Kanto Earthquake and World War II. This painting is amongst his only thirty existing oil paintings. In line with the avant-garde concepts of the Taishō era, Sekine, who was an autodidact, eschewed classical perfectionism. He utilized clear-cut lines and dense textures to highlight absolute emotional truthfulness and existential fragility in preference to skillful virtuosity. The compelling visual juxtaposition is achieved by positioning the vermilion clothing next to a contrasting blue-green background. The energetic brush strokes produce what is called by art critics "spiritual exaltation," leading the audience to a hallucinatory psychological realm rather than the realistic one.
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