Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Rooftops of Nagoya

Preview image of work. woodblock on paper, Rooftops of Nagoya 19431

2010.10.16

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Rooftops of Nagoya

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Artist

Junichiro Sekino (Jun'ichiro Sekino) (Aomori city (northern Honshu), Japan, 1914 - 1988)

Title

Rooftops of Nagoya

Creation Date

1963

Century

mid-20th century

Dimensions

24 9/16 in. x 18 7/16 in. (62.39 cm x 46.83 cm)

Object Type

Creation Place

Asia, Japan

Medium and Support

woodblock on paper

Credit Line

Gift of D. Lee Rich, P’78 ‘80 and John Hubbard Rich, Jr. Class of 1939 Litt.D. 1974, P’78 ‘80

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

2010.10.16

Junichirō Sekino was a largely self-taught artist whose fame brought him to the United States as a teacher of woodblock printing in the 1950s and 60s. Sekino was best known as a skilled portraitist (see his Portrait of Kawabata Yasunari nearby), yet he also created images of the theatre, the natural world, and landscapes, some of which he based on Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road. Sekino’s images of architecture that he carved in response to the famous series from the 1830s are similar to this work. The flat areas of color and differing textures in Rooftops of Nagoya show the artist’s affinity for geometric shapes and repetitive patterns. As with many of his prints, Sekino uses an economy of design to reduce a city view to near abstraction.