Notre Dame de Paris

Sekino traveled in Europe and produced prints in response to Western architecture and urban life, and this image of Notre-Dame Cathedral is among the most direct expressions of that encounter. The Gothic façade — its twin towers, rose window, and profusion of carved stone — presented Sekino with a compositional challenge he likely met by flattening the cathedral's sculptural depth into bold geometric registers, a translation consistent with the sosaku-hanga approach of subjecting observed reality to the logic of the woodblock medium. The contrast between the carved stone mass and the Paris sky above would have invited atmospheric bokashi. The subject demonstrates Sekino's range beyond Japanese subjects and his sustained interest in how architecture defines place.