Kannon

Kannon — the Bodhisattva of Compassion, one of the most widely venerated figures in East Asian Buddhism — appears in this 1954 print as one of Munakata's most central and repeated sacred subjects. He returned to Kannon throughout his career, each engagement producing a different rendering of the compassionate one: now serene, now urgent, now hieratic, now startlingly immediate. The 1954 version comes from his mature period, when his international reputation was consolidating and his Buddhist imagery was reaching its fullest formal development. His Kannon had none of the sweet gentleness of traditional representations but an almost masculine force.