Background
Saitô Kiyoshi (斎藤清 1907-97) was born in Sakamoto, Fukushima prefecture. He studied Western-style painting at the Hongô Painting Institute and exhibited his oil paintings with various art groups and societies. After having a print accepted by the Kokugakai (National Picture Association: 国画会), Saitô began to seriously pursue printmaking. In 1938 he issued his first prints in his now famous "Winter in Aizu" series.
Saitô worked primarily in the woodblock medium, while also producing works in collagraph, drypoint, and color and ink paintings (suiboku ga). He carved his images into blocks of various woods, either solid katsura or plywood faced with katsura, rawan, yanagi, keyaki, shina, or lauan, to obtain a wide range of textures. In some cases he used only one block for all the colors in a design, while for others he needed as many as 5 or 6 different blocks. He often used kizuki-hôsho ("genuinely-made hôsho," that is, the fine-quality paper made from kôzo, "Paper mulberry").
Saitô stunned the Japanese art establishment by sharing a special prize for Japanese artists (along with Komai Tetsurô for an etching/coarse-grain sandpaper print) at the Sào Paulo Biennial in 1951, beating out Japanese paintings and sculpture, still at that time considered to be superior arts. That a self-taught printmaker could grab such a prize was an outrage in traditional art circles (Saitô did it again at the Ljubljana International Biennial in 1956), but he was a singular figure in raising the esteem for such works and in directly contributing to the survival and development of the modern Japanese print on the international stage. The award-winning print was carved in 1950 for an edition of 30 and is known today as "Steady Gaze — Flower" 凝視 [花] (Note: This design is different from a slightly earlier [1948] large print by Saitô depicting a black and gray cat against a dark streaked-red background titled "Steady Gaze.") Statler called the 1950 design "Staring"; others refer to it as "Woman Gazing." The roughly 24x16 inch print required two blocks of solid katsura and four printing stages. The applied colors were sumi and gouache; mica was sprinkled on the white areas while they were still wet. Early paper was obonai made in Echizen, while the later printings were made on kizuki hôsho. Saitô said that for this design, he was influenced by Gauguin in the use of textured wood, and by Redon for the manner of personal expression.
Most of the above text is based on Fiorillo: https://viewingjapaneseprints.net/texts/sosaku_hanga/saito.html
Design
In the 1940s, Saitô worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for a newsletter published by the Tokyo National Museum. It was there that he encountered Buddhist statuary, which he sketched, familiarizing himself with the elements of these iconographic forms. As he worked on Buddhist imagery, he merged modern Western abstraction with traditional Japanese spiritual themes. Rather than creating literal religious icons, he sought to capture the sculptural essence and contemplative stillness of ancient statues found in Nara and Kyoto.
References:
- Harada, Minoru, Life and Works of Kiyoshi Saito.Tokyo: Abe Shuppan, 1990.
- Jenkins, Donald, Images of a Changing World: Japanese Prints of the Twentieth Century. Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1983.
- Paget, Rhiannon et al. Saitô Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening. New York: Scala Publishing and the Ringling Muzseum of Art, 2021.
- Gaston Petit, 44 Modern Japanese Print Artists. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha, 1973.
- Merritt, Helen and Yamada, Nanako, Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900-1975. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.
- Statler, Oliver, Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn, Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1956.
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