Door of the Brick Warehouse 

Artist Takada Yasuo was 18 years old in 1945 when he experienced firsthand and lost his own father to the Allied air raids on Yokohama. He rarely returned to the city, which was decimated by the attacks. But in the 1960s, he began making oil paintings of Yokohama based on sketches he had made prior to the raids. This is one such work, part of what he called his Yokohama Series. The red brick warehouse depicted was connected with his father’s work as a cotton trader. By scratching a faint net of diagonal lines into the surface of the painting he has created the impression that the subject is shrouded in a kind of haze, as though stemming from a distant memory. The work simultaneously conveys both his own mixed emotions and the historical record of his hometown.
(HIBINO Miyon)