Oak Tree in St. Louis, Shôwa period,

Oak Tree in St. Louis, from the Showa period, is a woodblock print by Shiko Munakata held in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums and documented through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org. The subject, an oak observed during one of the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) master's American sojourns, is one of the more biographically specific images in his oeuvre and reflects the international reception that followed his triumphs at the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennale and the 1956 Venice Biennale. After winning those prizes, Munakata traveled and lectured abroad extensively, and several prints from those years take their subjects from American landscape. The composition treats the tree the way Munakata treated every motif: as a structure of cut line and reserved white. The trunk and branches are described by thick, decisive strokes, and the canopy is built up from a dense field of leaf-shaped marks that read simultaneously as foliage and as pattern. There is no perspective, no shading, and no attempt to localize the tree within a topographically specific St. Louis. Instead the oak stands as an emblem, the way a single Buddhist disciple or a single Tokaido station stands as an emblem in Munakata's larger work. The mingei (folk craft) sensibility championed by Yanagi Soetsu is everywhere in the carving rhythm, but so too is Munakata's Pure Land Buddhist conviction that every subject deserved the same reverent attention. Severely myopic, Munakata carved with his face nearly touching the block, attacking the wood directly with small knives. The slight wobble and breath of each contour bear witness to that physical intimacy. Oak Tree in St. Louis demonstrates how completely Munakata absorbed even unfamiliar subjects into his own pictorial vocabulary, transforming an American tree into a thoroughly Japanese print.