Par Avion, 1975

Par Avion, 1975 is a Japanese woodblock print by Taniguchi Shigeru, recorded in the Harvard Art Museums collection and accessible through the ukiyo-e.org database. Made two years earlier than the related Air Mail print, it sits within the same conceptual cluster in the artist's output: works that take the iconography of international postal mail, the par-avion sticker, the airmail envelope, the printed border of red and blue stripes, as their primary subject.

Taniguchi Shigeru is part of the broad community of postwar Japanese printmakers who carried the woodblock medium forward as a vehicle for original artistic expression rather than as reproductive craft. In contemporary mokuhanga practice, the artist typically designs, carves, and prints the work, or supervises it closely, and the resulting image bears the direct evidence of the hand: knife-cut edges, ink absorbed into the paper, and the subtle variation of pressure that distinguishes a hand-pulled print from a commercially reproduced one. Par Avion exemplifies that ethos by treating an everyday, mass-produced graphic, a piece of postal ephemera, as worthy of the slow attentiveness of Japanese woodblock production.

The choice of subject also locates the print in its moment. By the mid-1970s, international correspondence by airmail was a routine but still culturally resonant means of personal connection, and the par-avion mark functioned as a small emblem of distance, travel, and exchange. Translating that emblem into Taniguchi Shigeru's restrained mokuhanga vocabulary, with its emphasis on flat color, clear shape, and careful registration, turns it into a meditation on transit and communication.

Researchers consulting the Harvard Art Museums record via ukiyo-e.org can confirm attribution, date, and medium for this impression of Par Avion, 1975.