Autumn In Aizu

Drawn from the same Fukushima landscape that produced his iconic winter scenes, this print shifts the seasonal register to autumn — likely depicting the kayabuki (thatched-roof) farmhouses, mountain slopes, and maple or ginkgo foliage characteristic of the Aizu basin in October and November. Saito's autumn compositions typically replace the high-contrast black-and-white of the snow series with warmer registers of ochre, vermilion, and umber, rendered in flat overlapping planes. The compositional logic remains consistent with his other Aizu work: simplified silhouettes, abstracted masses, and large undifferentiated color fields that read as much as design as depiction. The natural mokume of the cherry block is permitted to surface through the inked areas, giving each color plane a tactile, fibrous quality that echoes the rough washi support. Aizu was Saito's lifelong subject — he returned to the region repeatedly between the late 1930s and the 1990s — and these autumn variations form a counterpoint to the snow scenes that secured his reputation at the 1951 São Paulo Biennial.