Airplane

Airplane, made by Hatsuyama Shigeru around 1965 and held in the Honolulu Museum of Art's collection (https://[ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org/image/honolulu/7643), is a striking example of how the artist absorbed modern technological subject matter into his fundamentally lyrical sōsaku-hanga vocabulary. The composition presents the aircraft in a simplified, almost emblematic form: rather than a literal rendering of a particular machine, the airplane is reduced to a configuration of broad shapes and contours, its body and wings handled as decorative elements set against a generous expanse of ground color. There is no rigorous mechanical drawing, no documentary impulse; instead, Hatsuyama treats the airplane as a subject for childlike wonder, much as he had treated colts, elephants, and climbing trees in other prints of the period. This sensibility is no accident — he had spent much of his early career as one of Japan's most influential illustrators of children's books and magazines, and he never abandoned that imaginative register even when working at the more demanding scale of the independent woodblock. By the mid-1960s, Hatsuyama was a senior figure within the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement, having been a member of Onchi Kōshirō's Ichimokukai (First Thursday Society) since 1939 and of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai since 1944, and he continued to design, carve, and print each work personally. For collectors and students of Hatsuyama Shigeru, Airplane is a small but telling demonstration of how he could fold the icons of postwar modernity into a print sensibility rooted in the visual world of children.