Nude

The female nude, largely absent from the Edo-period printmaking tradition, became a recurring subject for [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists who looked to European academic and modernist painting as a model for the woodblock as fine art. Fujimori's treatment of the figure participates in this deliberate broadening of the medium's range, asserting that mokuhanga could carry subjects historically reserved for oil and lithography. Prints of this type typically rely on carved contour rather than modeling, using the limits of the knife and the flat [washi](/glossary/washi) surface to define volume through line and tonal block rather than chiaroscuro. Restrained palettes — often a warm flesh tone set against a single ground color — are common, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) sometimes used to soften transitions across the body. The presence of the nude in Fujimori's catalogue underscores his alignment with the sosaku-hanga principle that the artist's choice of subject is itself an act of creative authorship, distinguishing the movement from the commercial workshop output that had dominated Japanese printmaking through the nineteenth century.