Arab in Bagdad is a woodblock print by Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995) documented through the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org archive and reflecting one of the most distinctive aspects of his [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) practice: a sustained engagement with travel beyond Japan. Where his father Hiroshi Yoshida famously toured India, Egypt, the United States and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s to gather subject matter for the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) prints that made the Yoshida name internationally famous, Hodaka in his turn traveled extensively in Asia, the Middle East, Mexico, and elsewhere, treating these journeys as research expeditions for new printmaking projects. His Middle East subjects, including this Baghdad-themed sheet, are part of a broader cluster of works from the 1960s and 1970s in which Hodaka adapted figures, dress, and architectural ornament from his travels into the abstract and collage-like compositional vocabulary he had developed at home. This continuity is what makes him such a vital second-generation Yoshida: rather than simply repeating his father's travel-print formula, he absorbed the practice of international subject gathering and reinvented it within a postwar creative-print idiom in which the artist personally executed every block. The ukiyo-e.org record preserves visual evidence of Arab in Bagdad as it has circulated through dealers and collectors. For students of the Yoshida family, the print is an important reminder that the cosmopolitan outlook associated with the Yoshida name was not abandoned in the postwar era but transformed - its surface texture, deliberate flatness, and modernist composition signaling a Japanese print culture that had absorbed the lessons of mid-twentieth-century abstraction.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Arab in Bagdad was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高).
