Three Heads

Trained in woodblock printing at the Nagoya Municipal College of Art, where he graduated in 1941, Kinoshita Tomio learned much from studying the woodcuts of the Northern Renaissance masters Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Lucas Cranach (1472–1553). His early prints were based on landscape drawing, but in the late 1950s Kinoshita began to concentrate on creating abstracted faces or "masks," a thematic direction brilliantly recorded in the woodcut exhibited here. Working with a single U-shaped gouge, he creates irregularly formed parallel lines that approximate naturally-occurring wood grain, thus translating his medium partly into his subject. The background is also treated with carefully modulated areas of line cut from the face of the wooden block.

The somber, geometric head-like forms that emerge from the dark ground share a certain severity and angularity familiar in French Cubist paintings and drawings from around 1911. Though Kinoshita’s faces are beyond gender or race, their abstracted anatomies convey an intense range of emotions―in the words of the artist, "to express the sufferings of society, of man, of mankind, of all living beings." By carefully regulating the spatial relationship of the lines, the artist suggests the anatomy of a face that twists and turns with ever-shifting movements of distressed sadness.