Black and white

"Black and White" names directly the tonal economy that defines most of Hiratsuka Un'ichi's roughly 3,000 prints. Without specified subject in the title, the work belongs to the body of compositions in which Hiratsuka treats inked block and unprinted washi as opposed but equal pictorial elements, with no intermediate gray. The image is built through carved relief alone—knife marks left visible, ink applied with the baren to vary density across larger black masses. This reduction descends both from his early exposure to Western printmaking and from his study of pre-Edo Buddhist sumizuri-e, the single-block black ink prints that preceded full-color nishiki-e. As a founder of the sosaku-hanga movement, Hiratsuka argued that the print's identity lay in the cut block, not in the imitation of painted color, and the works he titled simply for their tonality stand as a clear statement of that position.