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- Medium:
- Linocut on washi
- Image courtesy of
- Hanga Ten
Description
The title locates this linocut within a numbered sequence — likely an artist's book, portfolio, or extended series — consistent with Hosoya's habit of producing prints in bound or grouped formats rather than as standalone images. The pictorial subject is unspecified by the title alone, but in his wider linocut practice from the Kamakura studio, sequences of this kind typically present a single schematic figure or pair: a musician with an instrument, a seated woman, or a circus performer rendered in the mask-faced manner derived from Picasso's late drawings. Linocut on [washi](/glossary/washi) gives Hosoya the heavy positive shapes the medium favors, while the absorbent hand-made paper softens the cut edge, registering the broad knife-cleared planes with a slight bleed at the borders. The juxtaposition of European cubist-derived facial schema against a Japanese washi support is the central tension of his mature work, and it would be active here in the relationship between block-cut form and the irregular grain of the sheet.



