Kiyoshi Saito valuation
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.
What a work by Kiyoshi Saito is worth
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Bio
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.
Otaru, the sign shop and Winter in Aizu
Saito grew up in Hokkaido, where his father had gone to work in the coal mines, and in Otaru he was apprenticed to a sign painter and by twenty ran his own sign business, studying drawing with Narita Gyokusen. In 1932 he sold the business and moved to Tokyo to study oil painting at the Hongō Kaiga Kenkyūjo.
He showed with the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai in 1936, and in 1937 had a woodblock print accepted in the print division of the Kokugakai. In 1938 he published the first prints of Aizu no Fuyu, Winter in Aizu, a series he came back to again and again. He died in November 1997.
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