Hair

A second Hair composition by Nagase, almost certainly a variant pose or alternate state of a subject he treated multiple times. Sosaku-hanga artists frequently produced related impressions — different keyblock cuts, color schemes, or framings — as the practice valued the artist's hand in every stage of production, including iterative reworking. The composition would typically isolate the figure against a relatively flat ground, drawing the eye to the dark mass of hair as a graphic shape rather than a descriptive surface. Nagase's mokuhanga of this period often combine deliberate, sculptural line — a legacy of his earlier study of carving — with restrained color, sometimes a single key tone offset by the natural cream of the washi. The repetition of the Hair motif across his oeuvre signals a sustained formal investigation rather than a one-off image, consistent with the experimental ethos of the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai he co-founded in 1919.