Say Okamoto Shinso and you mean that woman putting on lipstick. A woman in a glossy kimono, painting her lips. The picture is brilliant and the air of her hangs over it.

But the smile on the face of the woman holding the lipstick is comic. There is no other bijinga in which foolishness is exaggerated like this. Why did Shinso paint such a picture?

The work, “Lipstick”, is in fact his graduation piece for the Kyoto Municipal Specialist School of Painting (now Kyoto City University of Arts). He was in his early twenties. Inagaki Chusei, evidently a classmate, drew a study in the same composition. At any rate this single two-panel screen made his age his own. What was he after? At the point when interest in women is at its highest and his own experience must still have been slight, perhaps he was trying with all his might to find out what a woman really is.

He has one other major work: “Three Women Playing a Hand Game”. It is a picture of three women at play. He failed to finish it by the deadline and, they say, cut out only the middle part and handed that in — a dreadful waste of a picture. His mother came to see him, and he was obliged to break off. It is a strangely childish reason, and one is left speechless. The movement of the women’s hands is fully worked, the colour dances a deep red, the faces waver between the ugly and the beautiful: a work with a mysterious attraction.

These two works, together with the energy peculiar to the age in which he and his fellow painters lived, have carried Okamoto’s name down to us. But there is something regrettable as well.

He died at thirty-eight, and left few works. Youth alone will not explain it. Hishida Shunso, who had about as short a life, has perhaps ten times as many. Why was the output so small? That he was a painter of considerable experimental spirit is beyond doubt. Go through what survives and you see that each picture has some device of its own. But a good many seem to have been given up halfway.

This will not do.

Picasso painted intensively through 1932, and in 2018 an exhibition was held in Paris of that single year’s work.

Now try cutting Shinso’s work at any one year. An exhibition would be out of the question. Why could he not paint? That, I think, is an important question too. Painting a great deal matters. It is the one thing Uemura Shoen and Yayoi Kusama have in common. Paint a lot. Then we can talk.

Okamoto, wherever your spirit is: I like your work.
But if you are born again, paint a great deal more this time.