Monument to the Sky

The slug carries 'saru' (monkey), suggesting the composition features a simian figure within or as part of a monumental form rising against the sky. Ikeda's mokuhanga, while a smaller part of an oeuvre dominated by etching, drypoint, and lithography, retained the allegorical and surrealist sensibility that ran through his postwar work. The image likely isolates its central form against an expansive negative space, a device Ikeda used to invest familiar motifs with mythic weight. His prints drew equally from Edo-period sources and from European modernism, producing hybrid compositions that resist easy classification within either tradition. Technically, mokuhanga in Ikeda's hands tended toward flat tonal fields and crisp contour rather than the layered bokashi gradients of nishiki-e, with the baren used to register restrained planes of color on washi. Produced during the period when Ikeda's prints circulated widely through European and North American galleries, the work belongs to his broader project of relocating Japanese printmaking outside the meisho-e and bijin-ga lineages and into the global postwar avant-garde.