Monument Valley

Monument Valley translates the sandstone buttes of the Navajo Nation borderlands into the mokuhanga idiom, a subject Toshi Yoshida pursued during and after his American travels beginning in the late 1930s. He was the first Japanese printmaker to engage extensively with North American landscape, exhibiting in the United States and adapting the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition of celebrated places to terrain that had no precedent in Japanese pictorial art. The composition likely uses broad flat color planes for the desert floor with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) shading the strata of the mesas, registering the violent reds and oranges of iron-rich sandstone against a sky printed in graduated washes. Toshi managed pigment build-up across many impressions on heavy [washi](/glossary/washi) to achieve the saturated mineral tones the subject demands. The print sits within a body of work — including his Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and New Mexico designs — that extended the Yoshida studio's landscape practice into a genuinely cross-cultural register, neither tourist sketch nor purely Japanese stylization.