Tenderness, Shôwa period, dated 1959

The 1959 Tenderness pairs with the (A) variant as companion explorations of the same emotional subject—figures in mutual care, the human warmth of physical proximity between people who trust each other—rendered through Saito's characteristic formal reduction. By 1959 his figural work had achieved the compression that would define his career: bodies as geometric volumes, human relationships expressed through the formal logic of how those volumes relate in space rather than through depicted facial expression.