Autumn Season

Autumn Season is a woodblock print by Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995), the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida and a central figure in the postwar [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) movement in Japan. Unlike his father, who became internationally celebrated for atmospheric landscape prints in the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) tradition, Hodaka turned decisively away from representational scenery to pursue abstraction, collage-like layering, and experimental printmaking techniques that drew on global modernism. Working within the Yoshida family workshop tradition while simultaneously rebelling against it, Hodaka belonged to a generation of artists who insisted that the woodblock medium could carry the same conceptual ambitions as oil painting or sculpture. Autumn Season reflects this commitment to the sosaku-hanga ethos in which the artist personally designed, carved, and printed every block, treating the print not as a reproductive craft but as an autonomous work of fine art. The image is documented through the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org reference archive, which catalogues mid-twentieth-century Japanese prints from auction and dealer records and preserves visual evidence of impressions that have circulated through the international collector market. For collectors of the Yoshida family, Hodaka's work is essential because it traces how the second generation transformed a household name in shin-hanga into a postwar avant-garde practice, anchoring the family's reputation across two very different eras of Japanese printmaking. Autumn Season belongs to that transitional vocabulary in which seasonal motifs - long a staple of the Japanese print - are filtered through Hodaka's modernist sensibility and his lifelong interest in texture, layered color, and the expressive possibilities of the carved woodblock surface.