Doctor in Harlem

A 1960 print made during or shortly after Sekino's travels to the United States, this work depicts a physician — possibly observed in Harlem during the artist's American period — with the same unsentimental directness he applied to his Japanese figure studies. Sekino brought his woodblock vocabulary to American subjects without adjusting it for the new context, and the result has the quality of a Japanese artist's eye encountering American urban life on its own terms.