Bunraku

Bunraku is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi based on the Japanese puppet theater of the same name. Bunraku is the Osaka-rooted form in which large half-life-size puppets are operated by hooded onstage handlers to the chanted narration of a tayu and the playing of a shamisen, and its costumed, masked-feeling heads have been a magnet for printmakers from the eighteenth century onward. Saito Kiyoshi was one of the major sosaku-hanga (creative print) artists of postwar Japan — his career organized around the principle of jiga, jikoku, jizuri, the artist alone drawing, carving and printing the block — and his theater subjects are continuous with the Haniwa figure series and the Children of Aizu in their willingness to treat the human face as a near-mask, a flat-planed structure resolved into broad fields of color and decisive black contour. The grain of the wood is left to print through Saito's flat fields, an inheritance from mingei (folk-craft) sensibility that he carried into a modern international idiom. After his 1948 solo show in Tokyo and his 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, Saito found audiences for these theater subjects both at home and abroad, where they reinforced his reputation as a regional Japanese artist with an unfussy, immediately legible style. This impression is documented in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's holdings of postwar Japanese woodblock prints, aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, Bunraku belongs with the figure subjects rather than the Aizu landscapes.