After the Bath

The woman drying herself after a bath is one of the oldest subjects in Japanese printmaking, a staple of the old ukiyo-e pictures of beauties. Onchi Koshiro returned to it in the 1940s, in wartime and then occupied Tokyo, which is a little unexpected from an artist who had spent decades pushing the woodblock toward pure abstraction. The figure here is quiet and simplified, built from soft masses of colour rather than a crisp drawn line, so it reads almost as a study in shape. Onchi also worked as a photographer and a book designer, and he thought about a print the way a designer thinks about a page. He kept making prints like this in small numbers, pulling each one himself, up to his death in 1955.