Bellerophon

Bellerophon, executed by Hagiwara Hideo in 1965, is one of the artist's relatively rare excursions into named mythological subject matter, and it sits at the intersection of his abstract woodblock vocabulary and the broader cosmopolitan reading culture of postwar Tokyo. Bellerophon, the Greek hero best known for taming Pegasus and confronting the Chimera, gives the print a heroic and unstable frame: the composition is built from interlocking dark forms, jagged edges, and textured fields that suggest body, beast, and weapon without resolving into a literal scene. Hagiwara's approach is fully in keeping with the sosaku-hanga (creative print) tradition in which he had spent his career; each block was designed, carved, and printed by him alone, and the surface bears the kind of carved striations and uneven inking that signal personal authorship rather than reproductive craft. The print's restrained palette — deep blacks, smoky grays, and occasional warmer accents — keeps attention on the structural drama of the composition, while the dense carving recalls Hagiwara's earlier Mask and Soil works, transposed onto a classical theme. The Harvard Art Museums, which hold this impression in their collection of modern Japanese prints (https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/199196), preserve Bellerophon as part of a broader holding of Hagiwara material that allows scholars to trace how the artist moved between purely abstract series and works keyed to specific literary or mythic references. For students of Hagiwara Hideo, Bellerophon of 1965 is a useful case study in how the abstract woodblock idiom of the sosaku-hanga generation could absorb non-Japanese narrative material — here a hero from Greek myth — without abandoning the medium's grounding in carved wood, pressed paper, and the disciplined gesture of the artist's own hand.