Evening Bell

A nocturnal subject whose title evokes the bansho theme long associated with Japanese landscape poetry and the Eight Views tradition, here recast in Yamaguchi's abstract sosaku-hanga manner rather than the narrative meisho-e mode of earlier printmakers. The print likely uses a deep palette of indigo, black, and muted earth tones to evoke dusk, with the bell suggested through shape, mass, or implied resonance rather than literal depiction. Yamaguchi built such atmospheric darks through multiple overprinted impressions on washi, often introducing textural incident from non-traditional block treatments to produce surfaces that read as weathered or vibrating. The result aligns the print with his broader concern for translating traditional Japanese subjects --- temple precincts, seasonal moments, contemplative scenes --- into the visual vocabulary of postwar international abstraction. This connection to a classical poetic theme while working entirely abstractly was characteristic of the sosaku-hanga generation Yamaguchi belonged to alongside Onchi Koshiro, Saito Kiyoshi, and Hagiwara Hideo.