Party, Shôwa period, dated 1963

The 1963 Party—social gathering, celebration—takes Saito into the domestic social world rather than the temple garden or winter landscape he more typically inhabited. Multiple figures in conversation or proximity gave him a compositional challenge different from his usual close-up subjects: how to structure a group, how to use the flat woodblock medium to suggest the spatial relationships of people gathered together. The result would have shown his characteristic simplification applied to the geometry of social interaction.