Combing Hair

Combing Hair, dated 1929 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, is the most famous design Torii Kotondo produced and one of the touchstone images of late shin-hanga bijin-ga. Published by Ikeda Yoichi in an extraordinarily refined edition, the print presents a young woman seen from behind as she draws a comb downward through a fall of unbound black hair, her body folded forward into the private ritual. The image takes up an old subject of Japanese painting and ukiyo-e — the woman at her toilette — and renders it with the calibrated line of the Torii school, the lineage that had served kabuki theatre since the Edo period and whose seventh-generation head was Kotondo himself. The hair, carved as continuous lacquer-black sweeps interrupted only by the tines of the comb, demonstrates the technical extremes that the shin-hanga collaborative system could reach: the woodblock carver and printer working in concert with the designer to produce a surface that reads simultaneously as drawn line and as material substance. Like Long Undergarment, issued the same year, Combing Hair drew official scrutiny in part for its quiet eroticism, and its survival in major museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago confirms its enduring stature. The print articulates the central premise of Torii school bijin-ga in the shin-hanga era: that the intimate, unobserved moments of a woman's day could carry the same compositional gravity that earlier generations had reserved for kabuki actors on the public stage.