Portrait of Sphinx: Etching 3 of 6, Shôwa period, dated 1970

This third plate of the 1970 suite sits at the compositional center of Ikeda's six-part Sphinx investigation. By 1970, Ikeda had received sustained international attention and this series demonstrates the command of intaglio that characterized his mature Shōwa-period production. The "Portrait of Sphinx" suite frames an ancient mythological emblem within the conventions of portraiture—a genre that implies a knowable subject—while the Sphinx's identity as a figure defined by its riddle resists that knowability. The tension between portraiture's promise of revelation and the Sphinx's essential opacity generates the conceptual energy that runs across all six plates of the series.