Acrobats

This [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) print depicts street or theatrical acrobats, a subject that reflects the early twentieth-century interest among Japanese avant-garde artists in popular performance culture. Tobari, trained as a sculptor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, brought a distinctly three-dimensional sensibility to his printmaking; his figures tend toward bold, plastically rendered forms with emphatic contour lines that suggest volume rather than flat decorative outline. As a practitioner who designed, carved, and printed his own blocks, Tobari would have made direct decisions about line weight and the degree of key-block definition. The dynamic postures typical of acrobatic subjects suit his sculptural approach, allowing the interplay of tension and balance to be conveyed through the carved line itself. The print is characteristic of early sosaku-hanga work in its departure from the polished commercial finish of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) toward a more personal, expressive mark.