Fugen (Samantabhadra), from the series "Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Buddha Sakyamuni (Nibosatsu Shaka judai deshi)"

Fugen (Samantabhadra), 1968, is a Buddhist woodblock print by Shiko Munakata depicting one of the two bodhisattvas who frame the Ten Great Disciples in his celebrated cycle. Samantabhadra, the bodhisattva of universal worthiness, is traditionally paired with Manjusri and shown mounted on a six-tusked white elephant; Munakata flattens these iconographic conventions into a frontal hieratic figure rendered entirely in cut black and reserved white. This impression at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the 1968 reissue of the Two Bodhisattvas and Ten Great Disciples (Nibosatsu Shaka judai deshi). The series, first carved in 1939 and revised across Munakata's life, made him an international figure: it won the printmaking prize at the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennale and the Grand Prix at the 1956 Venice Biennale, the first such honors awarded to a Japanese printmaker. The composition is characteristic of the sosaku-hanga master's mature style. Form is generated by line alone, and that line is calligraphic in origin, swelling and tapering as if drawn with a brush rather than carved with a knife. The disciples and bodhisattvas of the series were originally conceived as hanging-scroll-shaped panels meant to be displayed together as a unified Buddhist assembly. Munakata himself called these works his offering rather than his art, framing his entire career within Pure Land Buddhist devotion. The figure here radiates a stern stillness, drawing on the formal vocabulary of early Japanese Buddhist sculpture but filtered through Munakata's exuberant, almost frenzied carving rhythm. The late impressions like this 1968 cutting are valued for their large scale and the supreme assurance with which Munakata commands the negative space of the block.