斎藤清 — 蕗を切る乙女 • 創作版画 • 日本 - Japan - 20th century

Artist: Saitō Kiyoshi (斎藤清, 1907–1997), born Aizubange, Fukushima
Title: Butterbur Cutting Maiden (Akita)

Date: 1946 (Shōwa 21)
Movement: Sōsaku-hanga (創作版画) — the creative print movement
Seal: Blue square artist's seal reading Kiyoshi (清) at lower left of the image
Format: Approx. 24 × 18 cm (9.4 × 7 in.)
Technique: Colour woodcut on washi, designed, carved and printed by the artist
Condition: Excellent!
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Why Sōsaku Hanga Deserves Your Attention

The creative print movement grew out of a specific objection. In the traditional system — ukiyo-e in the Edo period, shin-hanga in the twentieth century — a print was made by a chain of specialists: the artist supplied a design, a carver cut the blocks, a printer pulled the impressions, and a publisher commissioned and financed the whole thing and decided what was made. The sōsaku-hanga artists held that the finished sheet under such a system is not fully the artist's: it is the collective product of many participants, filtered through a carver's habits, a printer's judgement and a publisher's commercial calculation, and what reaches the paper is inevitably something other than what the artist saw.

Their answer was jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed. The artist takes the knife to the block and pulls the impressions personally, so that every decision from first line to final colour belongs to one person. Saitō worked this way throughout his career, and it is visible here: the slightly irregular cutting of the stalks, the wood grain left to print through the flat pink and green, the small variations that a commercial printer would have been paid to eliminate. What looks like roughness is the whole argument of the movement.
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About the Print

Two women stand in a stand of Akita butterbur, gathering stalks. The Akita-buki is a local marvel — a giant subspecies whose leaves grow tall enough to shelter a person standing upright — and Saitō uses it structurally: the leaves close over the top third of the sheet in overlapping greens, the stalks fall as a screen of vertical strokes in green, blue, pink and grey, and the two figures are glimpsed through them rather than placed in front of them. The ground is a flat, unmodulated pink; the cut stalks lying on it read as dark and cream flecks.

The colour is the point. There is no attempt at naturalism — pink earth, blue stalks, a magenta-and-white patterned kimono against green — and the flat interlocking shapes owe as much to Matisse and Gauguin, whom Saitō openly admired, as to any Japanese precedent. It dates from the year Onchi Kōshirō brought him into the Ichimokukai circle, the moment his mature manner arrives.