Lovers

Lovers presents a couple in intimate closeness — an unusual subject for Mori, whose work was predominantly concerned with theatrical performance, festival celebration, and the commercial life of the traditional city. The lovers' subject allowed him to explore a more private and personal dimension of human experience, the two figures creating a closed world of mutual attention that excluded the busy social life of his other genre subjects. His stencil technique, with its bold color areas and clear outlines, gave the intimacy subject a graphic directness that transformed it from sentiment into statement.