Artwork Page for Mother and Child

Details / Information for Mother and Child

Mother and Child

c. 1915–1955

Koshiro Onchi

(Japanese, 1891–1955)
Culture
Japan
Medium
woodcut
Credit Line
Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund 1959.240
Public Domain
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Location
Not on view
Print

Description

Kōshirō Onchi was a key figure in the sōsaku-hanga movement. He not only provided essential aesthetic and spiritual leadership, but his aristocratic background made him a forceful advocate of printmaking within the hostile bureaucracy of Japan's hierarchical art world. Onchi admired the nonobjective images of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky and the Expressionist style of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose works shared a kinship with his own interests in the expressive power of nonrepresentational and abstracted figural compositions as well as color. Onchi was particularly attracted to the medium of woodcut in which he felt he was forced to simplify his forms and thus intensify the expression of his emotion while cutting, gouging, and scraping the image into the block.
A vertically oriented woodcut in black ink depicts two figures curled in a swirling, circular composition. At the top, a dark-haired figure's profile faces right. Below, a rounded white shape with a dark point sits above a smaller figure with knees drawn up. Thick, jagged black lines create a frenetic texture, forming a dark border. This smaller figure's pale body stands out against the dense, swirling strokes wrapping the composition from all sides.

Mother and Child

c. 1915–1955

Koshiro Onchi

(Japanese, 1891–1955)
Japan

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