Birds

Birds, a 1959 color woodblock print by Shima Tamami, is held at the Harvard Art Museums (object 203142) through the bequest of C. Adrian Rubel, which preserves one of the principal American concentrations of her work. The print belongs to the bird subjects on which Shima's postwar Showa period reputation principally rests, produced in the year of her graduation from the Joshibi College of Art and Design in Tokyo and her first participation in the Joryu Hanga Kyokai (Women's Print Association). Shima committed herself from the outset to the jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) principle that defined [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), personally designing, carving, and printing each sheet rather than dividing the labor across specialist publishers, carvers, and printers as in the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) workshop tradition. The print displays the formal vocabulary that quickly distinguished her work: bold exaggerated woodgrain used as both texture and pattern, large flat areas of restrained color, and a careful negotiation between positive image and reserved paper that links her modernism to the long Japanese tradition of decorative woodblock surface. The bird subject is composed as a measured arrangement of silhouettes against a grain-figured ground, in keeping with the compositional discipline that would lead, three years later, to her inclusion in James A. Michener's landmark portfolio The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation. The Harvard impression preserves the clean registration and the disciplined inking that distinguish strong sheets of her brief Showa woodblock career.