Nude

Nude figures appear sparingly in Hagiwara's catalogue, which is dominated by abstraction and landscape, and they tend to read closer to drawing than to [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). The print likely treats the body as a shape against ground rather than as a portrait, in keeping with the European modernist reductions Hagiwara absorbed during postwar Japan's renewed contact with international art. [Sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga)'s first-generation principle — that the artist designs, carves, and prints each work alone — gives the figure a direct quality, the line carrying the carver's hand rather than the polished finish of the commercial Edo workshop. Soft [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations may model the form without recourse to outline, while the washi's tooth records each pull of the [baren](/glossary/baren). The subject sits in the long lineage of the female form in Japanese print, from Utamaro's bath-house bijin to Hashiguchi Goyo's [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) nudes, but the handling is closer to Matisse and the postwar Tokyo print circle than to either. It is a quiet exception within an oeuvre defined by abstract experiment.