Midas

Midas, made by Hagiwara Hideo in 1965, is one of the artist's relatively rare excursions into named classical mythological subject matter, sitting at the intersection of his abstract woodblock vocabulary and the cosmopolitan reading culture of postwar Tokyo. King Midas — the Phrygian ruler whose touch turned everything to gold — gives the print a charged thematic frame: greed, transformation, and the burden of literalized wealth. Hagiwara does not illustrate the story; instead, he builds the composition from densely layered fields in which warmer, golden passages sit against darker grounds, the carved surface alternately catching and absorbing light so that the very materiality of the print evokes the king's transformative touch. The 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 carved striations and uneven inking that signal personal authorship rather than reproductive craft. The print joins the same broader cluster of 1965 works — Bellerophon, Herakles — in which Hagiwara turned to figures from Greek myth as subjects for his abstract idiom, demonstrating that the sosaku-hanga generation's iconographic reach extended well beyond Japanese tradition. The Harvard Art Museums, which hold this impression and document it on their online collection site (https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/199197), preserve Midas 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, the 1965 Midas is a useful case study in how postwar Japanese abstract woodblock could absorb classical European mythology without abandoning its grounding in carved wood, pressed paper, and the disciplined gesture of the artist's own hand.