Design

Design is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, an artist who is usually remembered for explicit subjects — the snowbound farmhouses of his Aizu winter series, the Haniwa clay figures, the temples and gardens of Kyoto — but whose work always has a strong abstract underpinning. Saito Kiyoshi was at the center of the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement, in which the artist alone draws, carves and prints the block, and the studio doctrine of jiga, jikoku, jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) is legible in every choice this print makes: the limited palette, the broad unmodulated fields of color, the willingness to let the natural grain of the wood become part of the printed surface rather than sanding it away. That treatment of the timber as visible material rather than neutral matrix is one of the inheritances Saito accepted from the folk-craft (mingei) sensibility of the prewar period and brought into a modern, internationally-collected idiom. After his 1948 solo show and his 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, Saito moved comfortably between representational and near-abstract subjects, and pieces titled simply Design or Composition recur across his career as places where the formal grammar of the Aizu winter series and the temple gardens is allowed to operate on its own terms — shape, weight, balance, the white of the paper. This impression is documented in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria collection aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, the abstract designs are a useful index to the formal logic underneath his better-known regional subjects.