Woman of Kobe

A counterpart in spirit to Miss Kobe, this print continues Kawanishi's engagement with portraiture rooted in his home city. The subject is presumably a contemporary Kobe woman, perhaps shown against an identifiable local backdrop such as the harbor, a hillside street, or one of the foreign-style buildings that distinguished the treaty port from other Japanese cities. Compositionally, the print relies on flat color planes and confident outline carving in the sosaku-hanga manner rather than the delicate keyblock and hand-applied details of nineteenth-century bijin-ga. Kawanishi's portraits sit within a broader sosaku-hanga interest in modern subjects — workers, urban dwellers, contemporary women — that distanced the movement from the often retrospective imagery of shin-hanga. As with all his work, Kawanishi designed, carved, and printed the block himself, an expression of the creative-print movement's central principle of single authorship from drawing through impression.