Armchair

Armchair departs from the temples and landscapes that anchor Hiratsuka's output, presenting instead a single piece of Western furniture as subject—a signal of the sōsaku-hanga movement's openness to modern and domestic motifs that traditional ukiyo-e had largely excluded. Hiratsuka had trained in yōga, Western-style oil painting, before committing to the woodblock, and that training surfaces in works like this where ordinary objects are studied for their formal interest rather than their narrative associations. The chair's curves, upholstery, and shadowed underside would be carved as broad black masses set against bright passages of bare washi, the baren-pulled ink registering the grain of the cherry block. Such still-life subjects align Hiratsuka with European modernist printmakers as much as with his Japanese contemporaries. The print demonstrates the sōsaku-hanga principle that the artist alone executes every stage—design, carving, and printing—a stance Hiratsuka articulated consistently across an eight-decade career producing more than three thousand prints.