"a masterpiece of understatement" is correct and can be used in written English.
It is generally used to describe something that is not said very clearly, but is still meaningful and accurate. For example, one might say, "When describing the winning goal, the coach's comment was a masterpiece of understatement: 'It was a decent shot.'".
That is a masterpiece of understatement.
Which brings us back to "The Horned Man," itself a masterpiece of understatement and suggestion.
Mary Creagh, the shadow Environment Secretary, said the paper was "a masterpiece of understatement to spare government ministers embarrassment for their hasty fragmentation of the FSA in 2010".
Crowe's performance is already being hailed as a masterpiece of understatement, and the film itself is being compared to All The President's Men, the quintessential Seventies' Hollywood movie and a far cry from the high-tech pizzazz of his 1995 crime thriller Heat or the bombast of Last Of The Mohicans (1992).
The scene where young Jim watches four somnolent Japanese soldiers slowly murder a Chinese prisoner with telephone wire is a masterpiece of understatement and baleful resonance: even as Jim negotiates his own escape, we know that, on a deeper level, there is no escaping from such a sight.
To say this would have been against the run of play would rank as a masterpiece of understatement.
As King Kenny himself said after the match, in a masterpiece of the understatement on which he has built his post-match press conference reputation: "It wasnae a classic".
Some critics have called Gimme Shelter exploitative, but it's really, as Amy Taubin writes, "a masterpiece of restraint and understatement".
I copy the paragraph into my notebook, that masterpiece of understatement, of looking so intensely while afraid to look.
Narrated with icy precision and fastidious understatement, it is a masterpiece of simplicity.
A masterpiece of wounded innocence.
