Woman in Bagdad is a woodblock print by Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995) preserved in the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org image archive and belonging to the cluster of Middle East-themed sheets that emerged from his international travels. Hodaka, the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida, was an inheritor of one of the most internationally oriented practices in modern Japanese printmaking: his father had toured the United States, Europe, India, and Egypt in the early twentieth century and brought back subjects that became iconic [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) prints. Hodaka extended that tradition into the postwar period, traveling extensively in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and translating what he saw into prints made entirely by his own hand, in keeping with the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) ('creative print') movement's insistence on the unified artist-printmaker. Woman in Bagdad shows Hodaka adapting a figural subject - a robed woman seen against the architectural and decorative vocabulary of Iraq - through the layered, textured, abstraction-inflected idiom he had developed at home. The result is unmistakably a Yoshida print in its careful color registration and confident handling of the block, yet equally unmistakably a Hodaka print in its modernist flattening of space, its emphasis on pattern, and its refusal of the romantic distance that often characterized earlier Japanese 'foreign subject' prints. The ukiyo-e.org record preserves the work for the dealer and collector community that has long valued the Yoshida family's prints, and it helps document how the family's cosmopolitan ambition was successfully renewed by its second generation, ensuring that the Yoshida name remained synonymous with both technical mastery and international engagement throughout the twentieth century.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Woman in Bagdad was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高).
