Opus No. 2

Opus No. 2, a 1952 color woodblock print, is one of the early works in Yoshida's abstract Opus series, demonstrating his systematic exploration of non-representational woodcut composition in the immediate postwar years. The Opus series placed Yoshida in conversation with Western abstract art at a moment when Japanese artists were actively debating their relationship to Western modernism: whether to synthesize it with Japanese tradition, reject it as cultural imperialism, or engage with it on its own terms. Yoshida's Opus prints chose the third path, treating abstraction as a shared artistic language rather than a foreign imposition.