Fuji

Yamaguchi's treatment of the most-depicted motif in Japanese printmaking, recast in the abstract terms of postwar sosaku-hanga rather than the meisho-e tradition of Hokusai and Hiroshige. The mountain is likely reduced to a simple triangular or trapezoidal mass set within fields of color, with its identity as Fuji conveyed through proportion and silhouette rather than pictorial detail. Yamaguchi's interest in surface led him to build such forms with layered impressions, embedded textures, and irregular block edges that produce a weathered, atmospheric ground unlike the smooth flat planes of nishiki-e. The print belongs to a broader twentieth-century reconsideration of Fuji by sosaku-hanga and shin-hanga artists alike, in which Yamaguchi's contribution sits closer to the modernist abstraction of Onchi than to the picturesque mode of Yoshida Hiroshi or Kawase Hasui. Made on washi using the artist-as-sole-maker principle of jiga jikoku jizuri, it exemplifies his strategy of carrying canonical Japanese subjects into a contemporary international visual language.