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No Glory Left: Foujita’s Descent into Chaos

Last week, we stood at the edge of control—war rendered with eerie precision.This week, we fall in.In Last Stand of Attu, Foujita abandons balance entirely. Gone are the clean lines and quiet faces. What’s left is cold, crowded, and collapsing.It’s still beautiful. But now the beauty hurts. Let’s take a breath and step inside.

Author

Inbal Zakai
April 20, 2025

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Scream (marked red)

One soldier throws his head back, mouth wide open. It’s not a battle cry—it’s a howl. A raw, unfiltered reaction to a world collapsing. He’s alone, even in the chaos.

Tangle (marked blue)

In the center, bodies spill over one another. Some limp, some clinging to rifles, some just indistinct shapes. It’s a human landslide—one form bleeding into the next.

Slope (marked green)

The mountain isn’t background. It leans, presses, dominates. You can spot scattered figures on it, but they don’t climb—they vanish. The land itself feels complicit.

Fun Fact

Traditional Japanese hell scrolls—Jigoku-zōshi—were painted in the 12th and 13th centuries to depict the punishments awaiting sinners in the afterlife. They’re crowded, grotesque, and strangely meticulous: demons flay humans, crush them, boil them, judge them. These scrolls weren’t just religious—they were moral theatre, designed to shock and instruct.

Foujita almost certainly saw these works. In Last Stand of Attu, he doesn’t copy them—he absorbs them. The packed composition, the anonymity of suffering, the complete absence of relief—it’s all there. Except this time, there’s no Buddhist reckoning. Just men destroying each other.

Think About It 🤔 

What does it mean to paint war like hell? Not metaphorical hell—actual, visual hell?

In using this traditional aesthetic, Foujita turns a modern battle into a timeless moral crisis. He’s not just showing soldiers dying—he’s showing souls lost. The horror isn't only in what they’re doing to each other. It’s in what they’ve become.
No sides. No clarity. Just judgment, everywhere.

How does it relate to the here and now? or What to say during casual conversation to show off your art knowledge?

The Language of Trauma – “Last Stand of Attu isn’t just about war—it’s about what trauma looks like when it has no words. The broken bodies, the crowded frame, the lack of center—they all speak in fragments. It reminds me of how trauma is shown in contemporary art too: not through clear stories, but through disorientation, repetition, and silence.”

Now have another Look!

And If You’re Up for More…

  1. The British Museum’s Japanese department includes several Edo-period interpretations of hell imagery, plus rotating exhibitions of religious prints and scrolls. Their digital archive is also a deep dive waiting to happen.

  2. The Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne (Museum of East Asian Art) holds a small but thoughtful collection of Japanese religious art, with occasional displays of narrative scrolls showing heaven, hell, and everything in between.

Honestly? War is the most senseless, exhausting thing we’ve ever invented—no matter how skillfully it’s painted.

What do artists paint when the horror subsides? next week, I’ll make it up to you. We’ll turn to a subject everyone loves to look at, over and over again—because it’s soft, funny, quietly optimistic, and somehow always calming.
Promise

Yours,
Inbal Z M

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