The 1940s and 1950s were a pivotal time for Japan’s creative print movement, known as sōsaku hanga.

Just after World War II, artists who had primarily trained in oil painting turned to woodblock prints to portray the people around them, using the medium’s power and immediacy to capture a disappearing traditional world.

This exhibition features the work of four sōsaku hanga artists: Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955) and his followers Sekino Jun’ichirō (1914–1988), Saitō Kiyoshi (1907–1997), and Kitaoka Fumio (1918–2007). Onchi was the movement’s main advocate, and his name is synonymous with the group. From 1939, sōsaku hanga artists met at his home on the first Thursday of every month, where they received the encouragement they needed to flourish.

The portraits of this postwar movement are melancholic, and Onchi often cited the abstract and expressive portraits of Modernist European artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Edvard Munch as inspiration. Accordingly, the emotionally charged pieces he and his contemporaries printed during this era imbued their subjects with psychological nuance and depth.