Label Text:
A native of rural Fukushima Prefecture, Saitō Kiyoshi began his artistic career as an assistant sign painter and Western-style oil painter, creating his first woodblock prints only in the late 1930s. A self-taught woodblock carver and printer, he developed a signature technique of cutting and printing from a single block, instead of the multiblock process traditionally used for polychrome prints. Though he worked in a wide variety of subject matter, he built his reputation on landscape and genre scenes, especially those of the countryside. By the 1960s, Hokkaido had assumed a kind of primitive and wild quality in the Japanese popular consciousness—a great untamed wilderness to the north—making it especially suitable to his rustic style and also reminiscent of his Winter in Aizu series (1938), one of his first printing efforts, which depicts the snowy environs of his childhood home.
BB, 2014
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2010.44 |
