Boddhisattva

Boddhisattva by Yoshitoshi Mori translates a venerable Buddhist subject into the bold, graphic language of postwar Japanese stencil printmaking. Mori (1898-1992) is celebrated as one of the most accomplished makers of kappazuri stencil prints in the sosaku-hanga (creative print) tradition, a movement that broke from the workshop division of labor of classical ukiyo-e and demanded that every step of the print be carried out by the artist alone. Trained at the Kawabata Painting School and shaped by his apprenticeship to mingei folk-art leader Serizawa Keisuke, Mori absorbed both the disciplined patterning of katagami textile stencils and the unaffected vigor of otsu-e devotional paintings. Both currents are visible in this image. The bodhisattva, a being who has attained enlightenment yet remains in the world to aid others, is rendered not with the gilded refinement of temple iconography but with the heavy outlines and unmodulated color fields characteristic of folk devotion. Kappazuri begins with hand-cut paper stencils through which Mori brushes rice-paste resist and pigment onto washi, producing the fibrous edges, matte surfaces, and slight registration shifts that give his sheets their tactile presence. By treating a sacred figure with the same flat decorative vocabulary he applied to kabuki actors and samurai legends, Mori implicitly argues that the religious imagination of premodern Japan belongs as fully to the modern print artist as it did to the temple painter. This impression is documented through the ukiyo-e.org consolidation of the Robyn Buntin of Honolulu inventory and stands as a representative example of Mori's late-career devotion to subjects drawn from the spiritual fabric of Japanese life.