Georgetown street

An urban view drawn from the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where Hiratsuka lived from 1962 onward. The print belongs to the body of work in which he applied the visual vocabulary of Japanese mokuhanga to American subjects, treating Federal-period rowhouses, brick sidewalks, and street trees with the same architectonic clarity he had brought to temple gates and stone lanterns. Streetscapes of this kind typically employ a strong vertical and horizontal scaffolding, with the dark mass of building façades pressed against the picture plane and the negative space of sky or pavement carved into broad unprinted areas of washi. Window grids, shutters, and chimney lines provide the rhythmic detail that Hiratsuka extracted with the small chisels he favored. As an exponent of sosaku-hanga, he carved and printed each block himself, refusing the division of labor of ukiyo-e workshops. The Georgetown subject also reflects the artist's role as an informal cultural ambassador, teaching mokuhanga technique to American printmakers and helping seed the postwar interest in Japanese woodblock methods abroad.