Self-Portrait in Pointillist Style

This is a frontal self-portrait from the chest up. The background is mainly yellow, with short strokes of green, red, and blue lined up, and horizontal bands that look like a distant fence or row of houses can be seen. The face is built from small dots of reddish brown, green, and purple, with a black mustache and thick eyebrows placed distinctly. On the clothing, dots of blue, purple, and white overlap like waves, giving the whole picture a feeling of fine trembling.

As the title says, it adopts the pointillist technique of setting small brushstrokes side by side without mixing the colors. Pointillism was a way of painting begun in late 19th-century France by Seurat and others, and Yorozu is thought to have applied it to his own face to test how colors resonate with each other.

In this period just after graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Yorozu tried new Western modes of expression one after another in a short time: pointillism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Placing this work beside the "Self-Portrait with Red Eyes" at the same Iwate Museum of Art shows clearly how quickly he changed.

It is owned by the Iwate Museum of Art. Exhibition schedules can be checked on the museum's website.