Evening

Evening is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, one of the more atmospheric titles in a catalogue dominated by the snow-and-timber rigor of his Aizu winter series and the architectural plainness 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 the resulting prints reach for character through restricted means. Evening operates within those means: a darker overall key, broad inked shapes balanced against the cream of the paper, the natural grain of the woodblock left to assert itself through the printed surface as a faint weather of timber lines. That treatment, inherited from the folk-craft (mingei) sensibility of his early career and carried into a modern international idiom, is what gives even an atmospheric Saito subject its characteristic stillness. After his 1948 first solo show and his 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, Saito's prints circulated widely in the United States and Europe, where atmospheric pieces like Evening sat comfortably alongside the more documentary Aizu winter series and Kyoto garden subjects in collectors' portfolios. This impression is recorded in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's holdings of postwar Japanese woodblock prints, aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, the smaller mood pieces are a useful index to how a sosaku-hanga artist could pull genuine atmosphere out of an extremely reduced vocabulary.