Woman with Uto Bird

"Woman with Uto Bird" from 1956 — the year of Munakata's Venice Biennale triumph — combines two of his central preoccupations: the female figure and the natural world. The uto bird (the rhinoceros auklet, Cerorhinca monocerata) also gives its name to Munakata's extended series "The Tale of the Auklet" (Uto Hanga-kan), one of his most celebrated works. Here the bird appears with a woman — the two figures sharing the print space in the way that figures and creatures often cohabit in Munakata's work, as if belonging to a common world where the boundaries between human and animal are permeable.