Eyebrow Pencil

Eyebrow Pencil is a 1928 woodblock print by Ito Shinsui in the Art Institute of Chicago, a bijin-ga study of a single modern woman attending to her grooming with a small cosmetic pencil. The image belongs to the mature phase of Shinsui's career as the principal bijin-ga artist of the shin-hanga movement, working in a long-running collaboration with publisher Watanabe Shozaburo whose workshop combined traditional block carving and hand printing with twentieth-century pictorial values. Eyebrow Pencil exemplifies the intimate domestic register that distinguishes Shinsui's beauties from their Edo-period predecessors: the subject is not on public display in a licensed quarter but is caught in a private mirror moment, her concentration directed inward. Shinsui's drawing of the face is reduced almost to a few decisive lines, while the printing studio handles the tonal modeling of skin and the patterned fabric of the kimono through layered overprintings and bokashi gradation. The sheet is also a record of Showa-era visual culture, in which Western cosmetic practices and modern femininity were being absorbed into a still-thriving market for traditional Japanese-style imagery. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this work as artwork no. 2554, and it can be read alongside other Shinsui bijin-ga in the museum's collection as part of a sustained, decades-long inquiry into the modern Japanese woman. Source: Art Institute of Chicago.