The Japanese Western-style painter Saburo Aso (1913-2000) came of age as an artist during Japan's crescendo of militarism that began with the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and came to an ignominious end in 1945. But he refused to be drawn into the officially promoted propaganda painting of the time. The compromised art of painting in the service of a nation at war — depicting heroic fighting and individual sacrifice for the nation — was something against which Aso's body of work appeared to be a complicated, silent protest.

He did this by turning away from representations of the body politic, heavily emphasizing the self and immediate family; and then, in later works, dissolving figures into near abstraction that retained only vestiges of portraiture or body parts. As Aso put it, "Things lay heavily on the humans, crushed them, and, in the end, the humans disappeared."

Aso's early work in the 1930s was a composite of realism and Surrealism, the latter of which became subject to censure during heightened war activities because it was suspected to be related to Communism. His best works here are self-portraits directly addressing the viewer. In "Self-portrait" (1935), the figure is already beginning to dissolve and you can see at the top right of the head the background encroaching in, beginning to subsume it.