Street

An urban street scene in mokuhanga, tagged as part of Inagaki's small body of city imagery and a departure from the cat subjects that occupied the bulk of his output. Sosaku-hanga street prints from his generation typically reduce the city to a few architectural masses — a wall, a roofline, a lantern, a figure — flattened into stacked color planes rather than rendered with the perspectival depth of earlier Edo views. Carving emphasizes silhouette and contour, and the wood grain is often left to print through the larger fields as a textural register of the block itself. Born in Tokyo in 1902, Inagaki worked through the rebuilding of the city after the 1923 earthquake and through the postwar period, and his urban prints carry the modernist sympathies of an artist who came to woodblock from Western-style oil painting. The print reflects sosaku-hanga's insistence that everyday subjects, treated graphically, were a legitimate alternative to the historical and theatrical themes of ukiyo-e.