Untitled

Among Kiyochika's untitled prints, those catalogued as abstract often reveal his most technically intensive work, where the orchestration of multiple color blocks serves an atmospheric rather than representational end. This print likely employs a restricted palette — deep black, prussian blue, and a warm amber or white — to construct the impression of a specific quality of light encountered in Tokyo's changing urban environment. Kiyochika's printers used fine [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations along block edges to produce transitions that appear almost photographic in their subtlety, a quality that set his work apart from the more graphic conventions of Utagawa-school printmaking that dominated the preceding decades.