Rainbow #90

Rainbow #90, completed by Hatsuyama Shigeru in 1959, belongs to one of the artist's most distinctive postwar series, in which he treated the woodblock as a vehicle for almost dreamlike, lyrically abstracted imagery rather than as a tool for narrative illustration. The composition layers softly bowed bands of color across the sheet, with passages of pale blue, peach, and grey-white drifting one over the next as if seen through mist. Although the title invokes a specific natural phenomenon, the print resists literal depiction: there is no horizon, no rendered weather, just a sustained chromatic event distributed across the paper. The work is characteristic of Hatsuyama's later, mature manner, when he had moved decisively away from his early career as a magazine and book illustrator and turned the discipline of children's picture-book design — flat color, simplified shape, careful tonal relationships — toward a more openly poetic, near-abstract idiom. As a member of Onchi Kōshirō's Ichimokukai (First Thursday Society) and of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai, Hatsuyama was firmly embedded in the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement, which insisted that the artist personally design, carve, and print each work. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression and documents it in its public online catalogue (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16221), groups Rainbow #90 with other prints that illustrate Hatsuyama's transition from illustrator to fully-fledged abstract printmaker. For collectors and historians of sōsaku-hanga, Rainbow #90 is a strong example of how an artist trained in the deliberate clarity of children's-book design could push the woodblock toward a thoroughly modern, almost meditative use of pure color and shape.