Geraldine Hudson Beck

Portrait prints of named Western subjects were a distinctive feature of Sekino's work during his American travels in the 1950s and 1960s, when he taught at universities in the United States and produced a body of work documenting American people and places. This woodblock portrait of Geraldine Hudson Beck likely captures its subject with the psychological directness characteristic of Sekino's portrait prints — close cropped, with attention to the planes of the face rendered through carefully separated color blocks rather than modeled shading. Sosaku-hanga portraiture of this period often favored flat, bold color fields, and Sekino brought particular sensitivity to the rendering of skin tone and expression through limited but precisely chosen hues. The work represents Sekino's cross-cultural artistic engagement and his interest in portraiture as a vehicle for individual characterization.