Hiroyuki Tajima

Hiroyuki Tajima (1911–1984) was a sosaku-hanga (creative print) artist best known for boldly abstract woodblock prints built from broad areas of dense, richly pigmented color. Working as the designer, carver, and printer of his own work in the self-directed spirit of the creative-print movement, he became one of the artists who carried postwar Japanese abstraction into the international print world.

Tajima was born in 1911 in Tokyo. He graduated from Nihon University in 1932 and went on to study Western-style painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, from whose oil-painting division he graduated in 1943; he worked in oils before turning to the woodblock. He made his first print in 1946 and that same year joined the Bijutsu Bunka Kyokai, an association of abstract and Surrealist artists, and an early interest in Dada and Surrealism fed the experimental cast of his later work. He received guidance in woodblock technique from Nagase Yoshi, one of the pioneering figures of the sosaku-hanga movement, and in 1963 he became a member of the Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japanese Print Association).

Through the 1960s and 1970s Tajima developed the mature abstract style for which he is remembered. Rather than treating the block as a smooth printing surface, he built it up with various materials — crumpled paper among them — into a complex textured relief, and he devised his own dense, resin-based inks, brushing intensely colored dyes over a dark underlying medium so that layers of color accumulated across the surface. The results are wholly abstract compositions whose overlapping fields, calligraphic gestures, and rough textures draw on the ideals of East Asian calligraphy and traditional Japanese painting, with an open, Zen-influenced sense of space governing the relationships among their forms.

Tajima's prints entered public collections internationally. His work is held by the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Portland Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, among other institutions. He continued working until his death in 1984, having shown that the traditional materials of the Japanese woodblock — carved wood and water-based pigment — could serve a fully contemporary abstract art without surrendering their essential character.