Shaking Hands- LE

Shaking Hands- LE is a limited edition print associated with Tetsuro Komai, the pioneering Showa modernist who is widely regarded as the father of modern Japanese contemporary etching. The print is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org reference archive, where it is catalogued under the broader umbrella of postwar Japanese printmakers whose work bridged the gap between traditional hanga sensibilities and the international language of European-influenced intaglio. The image, with its understated title, gestures toward themes of human connection and quiet encounter that recur throughout Komai's body of work, where figures and motifs are often distilled into emblematic shapes set against fields of textured, atmospheric ground. Tetsuro Komai (1920-1976) trained in Tokyo and absorbed the rigor of European etching traditions, particularly the dry, linear discipline of artists like Stanley William Hayter, whom he encountered through his time in Paris in the 1950s. He brought that vocabulary back to Japan and effectively founded contemporary etching as a serious discipline within the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement, training a generation of printmakers at Tokyo University of the Arts. As a Showa modernist, Komai favored copperplate intaglio over the woodblock medium that dominated Japanese print history, and his compositions are recognizable for their restrained palette, finely bitten lines, and a poetic, almost surrealist sense of space. A handshake, in this context, reads less as a literal narrative scene and more as a symbol -- a meeting of hands, cultures, or memories rendered in the spare, contemplative idiom that defined his contribution to Japanese contemporary etching. For collectors and researchers, Shaking Hands- LE offers a window into the limited-edition practice that Komai helped normalize in Japan, where signed and numbered impressions established the modern print as a collectible art object on par with painting. Source: ukiyo-e.org image archive (Image ID 00039890).