Autumn Fruits

Autumn Fruits sits within Munakata's still-life and seasonal output, a body of work less discussed than his Buddhist figures but central to his engagement with the textures of Japanese rural life. Persimmons, chestnuts, gourds, or pomegranates were typical subjects, rendered not with the delicate gradation of classical kacho-e but with the heavy carved outlines and flat planes characteristic of his board-print method. The composition would likely fill the sheet with overlapping forms, the fruits pressed against each other and against the framing edge in the dense, horror-vacui manner of his mature work. Color, when present in such prints, was often applied from the back of the sheet (urazaishiki) so that pigment seeped through the washi to register softly behind the printed black line. Such seasonal subjects connected Munakata to the folk-craft (mingei) sensibility championed by Yanagi Soetsu, who was an early and crucial supporter of his work and who saw in these humble subjects the same spiritual seriousness Munakata brought to his Buddhist images.