Details

In Street Scene (1984), Shimizu Masahiro captures the dissonant poetry of the modern city—not in its monuments, but in its overlooked corners. A work of confident abstraction and observational subtlety, the composition anchors itself in a foreground of quiet space: a swath of mottled pavement or dusted sand, its expanse interrupted only by the spare linear suggestion of a wire chair, seen from above or beside, flattened into an abstract contour. The background pulses with verticality—urban towers, commercial buildings, and silhouetted treetops—rising behind a line of gridlocked cars, barely discernible but immediately familiar to anyone who has observed the rhythmic inertia of city traffic in the afternoon.

This rare woodblock print, number 3 from an edition of just five, exemplifies Shimizu’s economy of mark and precision of thought. Despite its architectural framing and defined structures, the composition is not weighed down by detail. Instead, Shimizu reduces the image to planes of blue, green, ochre, and grey—composing a scene that is as much about visual rhythm as about place. The unoccupied void at the bottom may suggest the lot surrounding an office complex, or the sandy open area of a small park. That ambiguity is its power: the in-between space becomes a meditative field where form and memory settle.

Connoisseur's Note

Born in 1914, Shimizu Masahiro was a product of Japan’s interwar avant-garde and later matured into a quiet innovator of postwar landscape design that ventured into abstraction. A member of the generation that straddled the Sōsaku-Hanga tradition and the increasingly global dialogue of modernism, Shimizu’s works reveal a pared-down yet deeply reflective sensibility. Street Scene is a potent contemplation of masterful restraint. There is no overt narrative, no bustling figures—only the echo of presence: the wire chair left behind, the stalled traffic mid-commute, and the softened skyline that watches impassively.

The scene embodies ma—the Japanese notion of space not as emptiness, but as interval. The bench-like form is not merely a design element but an invitation to linger, to view the city as it pauses. Through the tension between form and void, this work quietly questions how we inhabit modern space—how we sit, wait, pass through, and overlook. One of only five printed, this rare impression serves not as spectacle, but as meditation: a sparse and elegant reflection on stillness in the heart of motion.