Totem Pole

Totem Pole, produced by Hodaka Yoshida in 1958, belongs to the artist's broader late-1950s investigation of archetypal, totemic figures absorbed from a range of non-Japanese cultures and reworked through his developing abstract idiom. The composition is organized around a vertical, stacked configuration of carved forms suggestive of the Northwest Coast totem poles he would have encountered in reproduction and through the international circulation of indigenous Pacific imagery in the postwar decades, but no specific pole is illustrated. Instead, Hodaka treats the totem as a generic vertical scaffold for layered symbolic units — implied beaks, eyes, geometric mouths — built through patches of inking and carved grain that share the same textured register as the surrounding field. The result is an image that reads simultaneously as figural emblem and as constructed abstract surface, very much in keeping with the international postwar interest in tribal, ritual, and archaic imagery shared by artists from Adolph Gottlieb to the European Cobra group. For Hodaka, the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida and the painter Fujio Yoshida, this turn toward totemic and cross-cultural iconography was a deliberate departure from the Yoshida-family landscape tradition that his half-brother Toshi continued, and it situates him squarely within the international wing of postwar Japanese printmaking. The work was produced within the sosaku-hanga (creative print) framework, in which the artist personally designed, carved, and printed each sheet so that every chisel mark and inked layer would carry individual authorship. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/135970), preserves Totem Pole as part of a substantial Hodaka holding that documents his late-1950s expansion of subject. For students of the postwar Japanese print, the 1958 sheet shows how confidently Hodaka could borrow a foreign totemic structure and reweave it through a Japanese woodblock vocabulary, generating an image that is at once globally legible and grounded in the carved matrix of the block.