Gate of Myoshinji

This print depicts the Sanmon or one of the imposing entry gates of Myoshinji, the sprawling Rinzai Zen temple complex in northwest Kyoto founded in 1342. Kitaoka likely renders the gate's heavy timber framing, tiled hip-and-gable roof, and the worn plaster walls of the surrounding cloisters in the spare, structural manner characteristic of his Kyoto temple subjects. As a sosaku-hanga work, the print would have been self-carved and self-printed by the artist on washi, with the woodgrain often left visible in broad tonal passages and key blocks pulled with a baren to register crisp architectural lines. Subtle bokashi gradations across stone pavement or sky tend to soften the geometry of the joinery. The subject sits within Kitaoka's long engagement with Japanese architectural and landscape motifs that ran parallel to his abstract work, alongside studies of Horyuji, Nara temples, and rural farmhouses. After his Fulbright residency at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955 and his Paris years, Kitaoka returned repeatedly to such Zen sites as a way of measuring vernacular Japanese form against the modernist vocabulary he had absorbed abroad.