Nude

Nude, recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Japanese Art Online Database, is a study of the unclothed female figure that represents a less conventionally Japanese strand of Seiler's work. The Western academic and modernist nude was a staple of European art training and exhibition culture, and its appearance in Seiler's printmaking points to his Austrian artistic background and to the broader influence of European studio practice on foreign-born printmakers in Japan. Within twentieth-century Japanese printmaking the nude appears in the work of sosaku-hanga artists such as Onchi Koshiro and Ishikawa Toraji as part of the movement's project of expanding the woodblock medium beyond its classical subject categories, and Seiler's contribution adds an expatriate voice to this modernist current. The single-word English title, plain and descriptive, is typical of his straightforward approach to naming. Without an edition number in the available record, the print may exist either as a stand-alone composition or as a base impression of which numbered states also survive. The work is significant within Seiler's repertoire as a reminder that his subject matter, while heavily oriented toward recognizably Japanese motifs, also drew on the broader European tradition in which he had been trained.