Chariot of Fire

The title points toward kinetic imagery — the flame-wreathed cart of myth, or the metaphor of motion and combustion — handled in the geometric abstraction Hagiwara developed during the 1960s and 1970s. His mature compositions divide the sheet into broad planes of saturated color, each printed from a separately carved block, with the registration line itself becoming part of the design. Vermillion and orange laid over deeper underprintings would generate the heat the title proposes, while the matte surface of pigment-soaked washi keeps the color from glaring. Hagiwara worked alongside the Mono-ha and Gutai painters and shared their interest in materiality, but he kept faith with the slow craft of mokuhanga: hand-carved blocks, rice-paste pigment, the baren rubbing each impression. Prints like this one belong to the body of abstract work that earned him recognition at the São Paulo and Tokyo Biennales, and that situated sosaku-hanga within the wider field of postwar Japanese painterly experiment.