Cats & Butterfly

Cats & Butterfly is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, one of the most internationally recognized printmakers of mid-twentieth-century Japan. Saito built his career around the sosaku-hanga (creative print) ideal of jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed — and animal subjects became one of the touchstones of his domestic output alongside the Aizu winter series and his temple gardens. In this composition Saito treats cats and a butterfly as flat shapes pressed against the picture plane, the kind of bold silhouetting that made his work legible at a glance to postwar collectors in Tokyo and abroad. The surface bears the heavy, fibrous grain of natural wood that Saito famously refused to sand away; instead he inked the block so that the timber's striations come through as a subtle weather, lending even a domestic scene the feeling of a folk object. The reduced palette and confident outlines are characteristic of the manner Saito refined after his first solo show in 1948 and his decisive 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, which transformed him from a regional Aizu artist into one of the public faces of contemporary Japanese print. Cats appear repeatedly across his oeuvre as both formal exercise — a chance to play massed black against snow-white paper — and as quiet companions to the snowbound farmhouses of his native Fukushima. This impression is documented through ukiyo-e.org's aggregation of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria collection, where Saito's prints are catalogued among the museum's holdings of postwar Japanese woodblock work. For collectors building a sosaku-hanga collection, his animal subjects offer a more accessible entry point to Saito Kiyoshi's vocabulary than the better-known Aizu and Haniwa series.