Abstract

Abstract belongs to the mature phase of Kitaoka's career, when his subject matter shifted from documentary realism — a mode he pursued in postwar Tokyo through scenes of labor and ordinary life — toward non-representational composition. The transition reflects his absorption of European and American modernism during his time in Paris and his subsequent residency in New York, where he encountered Abstract Expressionism and the geometric abstraction circulating in mid-century print biennales. Sosaku-hanga abstraction typically retained the material specificity of mokuhanga: the absorbency of washi, the gradations achievable through bokashi, the textural register of the woodgrain. Rather than abandoning tradition, Kitaoka and contemporaries such as Saito Kiyoshi and Hagiwara Hideo used the woodblock to produce abstractions that remained recognizably Japanese in surface and finish. The composition likely deploys intersecting planes, calligraphic mark-making, or tonal fields, treating the block as both image-bearer and physical object whose grain and edge are integral to the work.