Portrait of a Woman

The 1945 Portrait of a Woman—made the year Japan's defeat ended the Pacific War—belongs to the period when Saito was finding his mature voice. The female portrait in close-up, the face rendered with simplified features and bold contour, shows him working through the reductive approach that would define the next fifty years. The wartime and immediate postwar portraits often have a concentrated, interior quality, as if the experience of those years focused the artist's attention on the essential human face.