Portrait Of Fritz Bilsinger

Fritz Bilsinger, presumably a European or American sitter, was portrayed by Sekino as the male counterpart to the artist's portrait of Inge Bilsinger. Sekino's portrait commissions for Western patrons were one product of his sustained engagement with international audiences from the late 1950s onward, including teaching residencies at American universities and exhibitions across Europe. His approach to portraiture combined the structural discipline of woodblock printing — where each color must be carved as a separate block and registered against earlier impressions — with sensitivity to individual likeness, a combination rarely attempted in earlier Japanese print traditions. The technique typically yields a face built from flat color planes, defined contour, and selective use of bokashi gradation to model volume. Such portraits sit alongside his Faces of Japan series, his theatrical subjects, and his Tokaido landscapes within a broad sosaku-hanga oeuvre.