Abstract cityscape

Abstract cityscape pushes Kitaoka's urban observation toward a non-representational arrangement in which the buildings, streets, and signage of a modern city are reduced to interlocking geometric planes. The composition would borrow from the visual vocabulary of mid-twentieth-century abstraction — Mondrian, Klee, the Japanese avant-garde — while exploiting the woodblock's particular suitability for flat color and crisp edge. Each printed plane corresponds to a separate carved block, and the registration of one block against the next becomes the structural logic of the image. The work sits at the intersection of Kitaoka's Paris and New York experiences, where the postwar Japanese printmaker encountered urban modernity in dense built form, and the lessons of those years filtered back into his practice. Abstract subjects were never the totality of his output — he continued to produce figurative landscape and figure prints throughout his career — but they marked the modernist phase of his [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) work, in which the Japanese woodblock medium was carried into the formal territory of postwar international abstraction.