Cat

A standalone cat composition, typifying the subject for which Inagaki became identified after the 1930s. Prints in this series strip the animal to its essentials: a black silhouette holding the centre of the sheet, eyes printed as bright slits or rounded discs, whiskers and contour incised through the key block in a few decisive cuts. The flat unmodulated ground — frequently a soft yellow, ochre, or muted blue — acts as both wall and air, refusing perspectival depth. The decision is technical as much as pictorial: each color requires a separate carved block aligned against [kento](/glossary/kento) registration marks, and reducing the palette to two or three tones keeps the printing within the means of an artist working without studio assistants, in keeping with [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga)'s self-printing ethos. Inagaki's cats helped translate the modernist graphic vocabulary of European poster art into mokuhanga and gave the post-war creative-print movement one of its most circulated motifs internationally.