Horses Among Green Trees (Midori no naka no uma)

Horses Among Green Trees (Midori no naka no uma), a 1964 color woodblock print by Shima Tamami, is held at the Harvard Art Museums through the bequest of C. Adrian Rubel and stands among the latest sheets of her brief sosaku-hanga career. By 1964 Shima had married a fellow artist and relocated, or was about to relocate, to the United States, and her output as a printmaker would effectively cease the following year, leaving the body of work on which her reputation rests as a small coherent group of postwar Showa period prints produced between 1958 and the mid 1960s. Horses Among Green Trees represents the horse subject she returned to alongside birds, cropped landscapes, and still lifes. The composition deploys 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 organized around the horses and the foliage, and a careful balance between positive image and reserved paper. The result is at once modernist and rooted in the long Japanese tradition of decorative woodblock surface. The print follows the jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) principle that defined the sosaku-hanga movement, and the Harvard impression preserves the disciplined registration, clean inking, and grain-figured atmosphere that distinguish strong sheets of her final productive years.