Dream (B)

Dream (B) is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, one of the more interior subjects in a catalogue otherwise dominated by the documentary regionalism of his Aizu winter series and the architectural rigor of his Kyoto temple subjects. Saito Kiyoshi's working principle was that of the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement — jiga, jikoku, jizuri, the artist alone draws, carves and prints the block — and that discipline of a single hand makes possible the unusually quiet, contained mood of pieces titled Dream. The composition is built from broad inked shapes, with figural or near-figural masses balanced against the cream of the paper and the natural grain of the woodblock left to print through the open ground so that the surface is faintly textured rather than flat. That grain-as-atmosphere treatment is the signature device that ties even an interior subject like Dream visually to the snow fields of the Aizu winter series and the gravel of the Kyoto stone gardens — same surface logic, different emotional weather. After his 1948 first solo show and his 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, Saito Kiyoshi's prints circulated widely in the United States and Europe, where work of this contemplative kind sat comfortably alongside the more documentary Aizu and Kyoto subjects in collectors' portfolios. Dream (B) is documented in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's collection of postwar Japanese woodblock prints, aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, the mood pieces are a useful counterweight to the long regional series.