Atomic Desert (1952), 180 x 720 cm

I had known about Iri and Toshi Maruki for many years before I could bring myself to visit the gallery devoted to their work. Their Hiroshima Panels are known throughout the world for their excruciating and artistically uncompromising depiction of the atomic bombing of that city and its aftermath. When I finally went it was on a hot summer day, just a few weeks before the 63rd anniversary of the bombing on August 6. It seemed almost contradictory that a museum devoted to such horrific subject matter should lie in such a peaceful, bucolic setting, next to a meandering river in rural Saitama Prefecture, a full hour by train from downtown Tokyo.

This is in fact where the Marukis -- both accomplished artists whose oeuvres were never confined solely to portrayals of man's inhumanity to man -- lived and painted for the latter half of their careers (Iri died in 1995, Toshi in 2000). The Maruki Gallery was built next door to their home and atelier while both artists were still active; today it is run by a nonprofit foundation. Its primary function is to house fourteen of the massive murals that make up the Hiroshima Panels (a fifteenth is at a museum in Nagasaki), but the gallery also displays other works by the Marukis, as well as by Iri's mother Suma Maruki, a delightful water colorist in her own right.

Iri, raised in Hiroshima, had already established himself as a modernist painter in the traditional sumi ink medium and was living in Tokyo when the bomb fell on his hometown. His wife Toshi, who hailed from Hokkaido, was a talented figure painter and a popular illustrator of children's books. They entered the destroyed city mere days after the bombing to search for Iri's relatives, and what they saw there transformed their lives and careers.

To convey those horrors, they embarked on an artistic collaboration that lasted over forty years. The nucleus of this effort is the fifteen Hiroshima Panels, each spreading across eight two-meter high screens in the classic byobu format, and each devoted to a different aspect of the atomic holocaust: Ghosts, Fire, Water, Rescue, and so on. Initially focusing on the immediate aftermath of the bombing, they later added works showing fishermen irradiated by H-bomb tests in the south Pacific, the deaths of American prisoners of war in Hiroshima, and the abandonment of Korean bomb victims. Still later, they began painting murals about other holocausts, including those perpetrated by the Japanese: Auschwitz, Nanking, Minamata.

Over the years their style evolved too; the images, though never abstract, became less representational. Some of the early panels are almost photorealistic in their rendering of the bomb victims, but later works are more adventurous, like the nearly cubist treatment of memorial lanterns on a river in "Floating Lanterns."

As the Marukis themselves have written, their collaboration was never easy and entailed much conflict and even competition. But their talents were marvelously complementary and the results are consistently stunning and profound. Toshi was responsible for the graphically lifelike human figures, mostly naked, that dominate the panels -- she says she sketched over 900 models, mostly volunteers. Iri covered the surfaces with great swathes of sumi ink, so that the paintings are predominantly in blacks and grays, with red used sparingly but forcefully for flames and blood.

I think I avoided visiting the Maruki Gallery for so long not because of any aversion to seeing such violent imagery, but out of a fear that I would find their work overly didactic and short on artistic value, as political art often can be. But the Marukis' work is neither of those things. What makes the Panels (and their other murals) so successful and compelling is the integrity of the Marukis as artists who used the full range of their talent and experience to convey the horrors they saw. They never compromised their art for the sake of their message, trusting that the message would speak for itself. And it most eloquently does. Anyone interested in gleaning even a small sense of what it was like to be in Hiroshima in August 1945 can benefit from a visit to this museum.

Rescue (1954), 180 x 720 cm