Scenery of radio towers

A distinctly modern subject for mokuhanga: the radio tower, a piece of twentieth-century industrial infrastructure that sits well outside the inherited subject-matter of ukiyo-e. The print belongs to the sosaku-hanga tendency to treat contemporary urban scenery — power lines, smokestacks, rail bridges, broadcasting masts — as legitimate material for the woodblock medium, and reflects the movement's insistence that the artist's eye should engage the present rather than restage Edo. The lattice structure of a radio tower lends itself naturally to woodblock carving, where the negative spaces between girders can be cut cleanly through a single dark block to read as crisp geometric voids against a paler sky. Inagaki, born in Tokyo in 1902 and trained first in Western oil painting before turning to woodblock in the late 1920s, was well placed to bring a modernist sensibility to such infrastructural subjects. The print stands apart from his cat oeuvre as evidence of the breadth he occasionally pursued under the same reductive, planar approach.