Autumn Composition

Autumn Composition belongs to a recurring seasonal vein in Yamaguchi's work in which he used the palette and mood of a season as the structural premise for an otherwise nonrepresentational image. Rather than depicting maples or scattered leaves in the manner of meisho-e printmakers, he would build the composition from broad fields of russet, ochre, burnt orange, and dark brown or black, set off against a paler ground, with edges softened by bokashi or sharpened where blocks meet cleanly. The wood grain itself, picked up by the baren during printing, often does the work that drawn foliage would do in a representational image, supplying the granular incident the eye reads as season. This kind of restrained, almost calligraphic abstraction earned Yamaguchi a major prize at the 1955 São Paulo Biennial and helped establish sosaku-hanga as a recognized presence in the international print scene of the period.