Cat's Love

Cat's Love is one of Tomoo Inagaki's most frequently cited compositions, a print in which the artist's signature subject is treated with the affectionate stylization that defined his contribution to postwar sosaku-hanga. Inagaki (1902-1980) built his career around cats: a domestic, accessible motif that he abstracted into bold, decorative arrangements of flat color, textured ground, and emphatic outline. In the sosaku-hanga (creative print) tradition, the artist personally designed, carved, and printed each work, and Inagaki used that hands-on process to push the cat image toward graphic distillation rather than naturalistic likeness. Cat's Love brings two feline figures together in an interlocked, almost emblematic pairing, the kind of intimate animal subject that postwar Japanese audiences and Western collectors alike responded to during the 1950s and 1960s, when sosaku-hanga prints were widely exhibited and exported. The composition treats the cats as paired shapes set against a worked background, the visible woodblock texture functioning as both surface and atmosphere. This approach aligned Inagaki with sosaku-hanga peers such as Shiko Munakata and Un'ichi Hiratsuka in his commitment to the carved and printed surface as an expressive end in itself. Documented through ukiyo-e.org's print database, Cat's Love sits within Inagaki's extensive catalogue of cat prints and remains one of the works most associated with his name. For collectors building a focused collection of cat prints, or a broader collection of mid-century Japanese sosaku-hanga, this image offers a representative example of how Inagaki balanced warmth of subject with a modernist concern for shape, surface, and the integrity of the printed mark.