Bird Beginning Flight (Tobitatsu tori)

Bird Beginning Flight (Tobitatsu tori), a 1959 color woodblock print held at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the earliest sheets in Shima Tamami's brief but productive sosaku-hanga career and belongs to the recurring bird subjects on which her postwar Showa period reputation rests. Shima had graduated the year before from the Joshibi College of Art and Design in Tokyo and joined the Joryu Hanga Kyokai (Women's Print Association), the pioneering all-female society founded in 1956 to address the marginal position of women within the larger Nihon Hanga Kyokai. The print shows the formal vocabulary that distinguished her work from the outset: bold exaggerated woodgrain that lets the natural figure of the plank read as both texture and pattern, large flat areas of restrained color, and a careful negotiation between positive image and reserved paper. The bird is reduced to an essential silhouette in the moment of lift, the woodgrain providing both ground and atmosphere, in keeping with the jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) principle she committed herself to from the outset. The Art Institute impression preserves the disciplined registration and the clean inking that distinguish her best Showa woodblock work, and the print exemplifies the modernist handling of grain and flat color that placed Shima among the most distinctive women printmakers of the postwar Japanese sosaku-hanga movement before her career effectively ended after her mid 1960s relocation to the United States.