Face

A woodblock printmaker who achieved his first local success in the mid-1940s and international attention by the late 1950s, Kawano Kaori is best known for highly textured, abstract representations of children. Some of these prints lean toward the sentimental, but his best works are restrained and introduce an effective balance of simplified forms.

In this focused view of a child’s head, individual elements are sculptural in quality and arrangement. Kawano has effectively used the natural grain of the wood block, a characteristic practice of sosaku hanga ("modern creative") print artists. Like other sosaku hanga printmakers, he not only designed his woodcuts but also carved the blocks and printed his own impressions.