斋藤清 — 渔村中的女人 • 创作版画 • 日本 - 日本 - 20世纪

艺术家：Saitō Kiyoshi 斋藤清 (1907–1997)，出生于 Aizubange，福岛县
Title: Woman in the Fishing Village
Series: Nihon Jozoku-sen 日本女俗選 — "Women's Customs of Japan"
Date: 1946 (Shōwa 21)
Movement: Sōsaku-hanga 創作版画 — the creative print movement
Seal: Square black artist's seal at lower right of the image
Format: Chūban, approx. 26.5 × 19.5 cm
Technique: Colour woodcut on washi
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

A woman walks through deep snow carrying fish to market. She has a shoulder pole across her back with a broad flat basket swinging from each end, a wide woven hat over a magenta headscarf tied under the chin, and blue cloth boots. Over her dark working clothes she wears a blue maekake apron printed with her employer's mark — a circled 越 above the name 長谷川 (Hasegawa) — the shop livery that told everyone in the village whose fish she was carrying. Behind her the street is reduced to a few essentials: white snow-mounded roofs, a line of telegraph poles receding into the distance with snow caught on their crossarms, a bare tree, and other figures blocked in as flat dark silhouettes.

Saitō gets a great deal out of very little here. The palette is four or five colours over an unbleached ground, the drawing is cut in blunt, confident strokes with no attempt at refinement, and the wood grain is left to print through the blue sky rather than hidden. Only the woman's face and the red of her scarf carry any warmth — everything else is cold, flat, and receding. It is an early example of what would become his lifelong subject: people getting on with ordinary work in snow country, and the quiet dignity of that.