Plucking B

Plucking B, made by Hatsuyama Shigeru in 1959 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago in an edition impression numbered 8/11 (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16225), is a strong example of the artist's late sōsaku-hanga vocabulary, in which the directness of children's-book design is pushed toward something close to lyrical abstraction. The composition presents a stylized figure engaged in the act of plucking — perhaps a string, perhaps a flower — but the action and the body are abstracted into a network of overlapping shapes, with curving silhouettes set against softly textured ground tones. Color is handled with characteristic restraint: a warm dominant register is offset by quieter, cooler passages, and the small areas of more intense saturation function almost like accents in a musical phrase. The title's bare designation, Plucking B, suggests an underlying series in which the same motif was worked through several variants, each lettered or numbered to mark the gradation. As a member of Onchi Kōshirō's Ichimokukai and of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai, Hatsuyama was committed to the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) principle that the artist personally design, carve, and print each impression, so that the woodblock surface becomes a record of individual decision rather than a vehicle for reproduction. For collectors of Hatsuyama Shigeru, Plucking B exemplifies his ability to begin from an everyday gesture and end with a print that reads as both image and pattern, structured by the same sure sense of design that had governed his decades of work for children's magazines and books.