Grapes and Persian Bowl

This dark brown table with a drawer frequently appears in Yasui's work, here seen with vertically positioned purple and ripe green grapes. The expressive form, deformed in the manner begun by Cézanne, is also an experiment by Yasui in this work. He had painted this type of composition before, and it was particularly frequently used in his post-war still-lifes. The subdued palette, planar background and black outlines are all Nihonga in feel, while at the same time there is the specifically yôga Western style painting use of pigment feel and powerful brush strokes, two features that greatly differ from typical Nihonga usage. For Yasui, lines were "the most important element in a painting," and, "are not there to explain the form of an object, but rather to reveal the form of the object."