Portrait Of Hagiwara Sakutarô

This is one of Onchi's portraits of the symbolist poet Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886–1942), a close friend whose verse Onchi illustrated and whose intellectual companionship shaped his own conception of the print as a vehicle for inner expression. Onchi produced several portraits of Hagiwara across the 1940s, the most celebrated dated 1943 — a half-length image rendered in flat, somber color planes with the poet's bespectacled face and hand emerging from a dark ground. The portraits dispense with descriptive linework in favor of broad, registered color blocks, exploiting the matte absorption of washi to give the surface a brooding density. As mokuhanga conceived in the sosaku-hanga method, every block was cut and printed by Onchi himself, producing impressions that vary in inking and pressure. The Hagiwara portraits are widely regarded among the defining works of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking and a touchstone for the movement's elevation of the print from reproductive craft to autonomous art.