Kiyoshi Saito
Cut Kyoto gardens, snowbound villages and stone Buddhas into woodblocks, and printed them himself.
Kiyoshi Saito was born in Fukushima in 1907, worked as a sign painter, and became one of the leading figures of the sosaku-hanga movement, in which the artist designs, cuts and prints the block personally rather than dividing the work between craftsmen as the older ukiyo-e system had done. His subjects are the temples and gardens of Kyoto, the thatched villages of Aizu under snow, cats, and the haniwa and stone Buddhas of early Japan, rendered in flat planes with the grain of the plank deliberately printed as texture. He won at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1951 and died in 1997.
This is a print market and a substantial one, principally in Japan and the United States. Saito printed in editions, usually of eighty to two hundred, signed and titled in pencil, and there are also later editions and posthumous printings, so establishing which is essential. Impressions vary in quality and colour registration, and a fresh, well-registered impression is worth considerably more than a tired one. The papers are light-sensitive and fading, foxing and mount-burn are the usual condition faults. Original works on paper are far scarcer.
If you own a work by Kiyoshi Saito
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