Curtain Lecture

Curtain Lecture, a color woodblock from 1957, takes its title from an English idiom — a scolding given by a wife to her husband after retiring to bed — that was apparently adopted into the vocabulary of the Tokyo print world. The domestic scene behind closed curtains, where the unequal power relationship of the marital bed is temporarily reversed, gives Yamaguchi a subject for semi-abstract figure work that combines humor with social observation. The "curtain" serves both as compositional device and as the literal drape behind which private life occurs.