Face of a woman

Face of a woman represents Kitaoka's engagement with portraiture in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) vein, distinct from the historic [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition of idealized beauties produced collaboratively in the Edo and [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) periods. As a creative-print artist, Kitaoka would have carved and printed this work himself, allowing the cuts of the knife and the grain of the block to register directly on the [washi](/glossary/washi). Mid-century sosaku-hanga portraits typically reduced facial features to broad planes of color and decisive contour lines, drawing on both the modernism Kitaoka encountered during his Paris years and the woodcut traditions of European Expressionism. His teacher Hiratsuka Un'ichi, who introduced him to woodblock at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, similarly favored simplification of form. The print likely shows a single sitter rendered through a limited color palette, the human subject framed less as social commentary than as a study in the formal possibilities of carved line and pressed pigment.