Key Bridge, Washington DC

The Francis Scott Key Bridge crosses the Potomac River, linking Georgetown with Rosslyn, Virginia. Hiratsuka relocated to Washington DC in 1962 and remained for over three decades, producing a body of American-subject prints during his final working period. This print treats the bridge's repeating concrete arches through his characteristic mode of bold black silhouette against unprinted ground, the strong geometric form well suited to his reductive aesthetic. Hiratsuka's American work extended the principles he had established in Japan—self-designed, self-carved, self-printed mokuhanga—to landmarks of his adopted country. The Potomac scenes from this period join earlier prints of bridges throughout Japan in a sustained engagement with infrastructure as worthy of artistic attention. The American landscapes apply a Japanese print idiom to architecture and topography that have no native counterpart in the genre, a transposition rare among sosaku-hanga artists, who remained focused predominantly on Japanese subjects throughout their careers.