Glaukos

Glaukos, produced by Hagiwara Hideo in 1965, is one of the artist's relatively rare excursions into named Greco-Mediterranean material, and it sits at the intersection of his abstract woodblock vocabulary and the broader cosmopolitan reading culture of postwar Tokyo. The name Glaukos belongs to several figures in Greek myth — most notably a sea-deity transformed by enchanted herbs and a doomed son of Minos — and the print's composition, with its layered passages of cool greens and blues offset against warmer dark accents, encourages the viewer to read the work in elemental terms: water, depth, transformation. Rather than illustrate any specific narrative episode, Hagiwara treats the name as a tonal cue, building a centered structure of interlocking forms whose edges blur into the surrounding field, so that the figure of the deity is registered as a presence within the watery medium rather than as an extracted body. The print belongs to a sequence of mid-1960s works — alongside Bellerophon and the Man in Armor series — in which Hagiwara absorbed mythological and warrior imagery into his sustained abstract idiom. As with all of his output, Glaukos was designed, carved, and printed by him personally, in keeping with the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) movement's foundational claim that each impression be a fully authored act. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/135480), preserves Glaukos as part of its holding of Hagiwara's 1960s output. For students of Hagiwara Hideo, the 1965 print demonstrates how the abstract woodblock idiom could accommodate non-Japanese mythological material — here a Greek sea-figure — without compromising the medium's grounding in carved wood, layered ink, and personal gesture.