Black Cat #15

Black Cat #15 belongs to Tomoo Inagaki's long-running series of feline studies, a body of work that helped define his reputation within the postwar sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement. Inagaki (1902-1980) was among the relatively small group of Japanese printmakers who chose a single subject and pursued it across decades, and his cat prints became the vehicle through which he refined a distinctive vocabulary of flat shape, textured planes, and stylized silhouette. The numbered title indicates the print's place within that ongoing investigation rather than a single dated edition, and the image presents the cat as a compressed graphic form rather than a naturalistic study. The black animal is reduced to essential contours and bold negative space, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga principle that the artist should design, carve, and print the work himself, treating the woodblock as an expressive medium rather than a reproductive one. The visible grain and inked surface qualities reward close looking, hallmarks of self-printed sosaku-hanga production. Inagaki's cat prints circulated widely through mid-century print exchanges and exhibitions and remain among the most identifiable works in the genre. Documented through ukiyo-e.org's aggregated print database, Black Cat #15 sits alongside Cat's Love, Cat's Parade, and dozens of other feline subjects that together form one of the most sustained explorations of a single animal in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. For collectors of sosaku-hanga and of cat prints in particular, Inagaki's numbered black-cat compositions offer a clear example of how postwar Japanese artists pushed the woodblock medium toward modernist abstraction while retaining the tactile, hand-made character that distinguishes the creative-print movement from the earlier ukiyo-e and shin-hanga traditions.