Yoshida Chizuko

Examines a fiercely creative and lyrical body of work

Although she is considered the most avant-garde member of the Yoshida family, Yoshida Chizuko's legacy has been overshadowed by the celebrated male artists in the family, particularly her father-in-law, Yoshida Hiroshi, and her husband, Yoshida Hodaka. This book charts Chizuko's sustained engagement with abstraction and music in the immediate postwar years and the evolving visual language of her practice, leading to neon-colored Op art, works inspired by commercial advertising, and later poetic and transient themes drawn from nature.

This ambitious catalog includes more than one hundred works of art produced over sixty years: early paintings and sketches, rare monotypes, woodblock prints, and zinc-plate mixed media prints, many of which are published here for the first time. The original scholarship by Jeannie Kenmotsu, Hollis Goodall, Noriko Kuwahara, and Ayomi Yoshida represents a major step forward in studies of twentieth-century Japanese women printmakers, who have long been relegated to the sidelines. Their essays provide critical context for Chizuko's significance as a member of the Yoshida family and as a key artist in the flourishing network of the postwar Creative Print movement in Japan.

Yoshida Chizuko expands the discourse on the history of international printmaking, modern art, and gender outside the Euro-American sphere, and on the unique challenges of pursuing art as a woman during the American occupation of Japan and its immediate aftermath.