<b>MORNING OF NEW YEARS DAY IN GINZA</b> / Toshi Yoshida1958<b>SOLD</b></em>

Details

Toshi Yoshida was the oldest son of Hiroshi and Fujio Yoshida. In early childhood, one of Yoshida’s legs was paralyzed. Unable to attend school, the young Yoshida enjoyed watching and sketching animals as well as being in his father’s print shop. As Yoshida grew older he showed interest in making prints and under his father’s tutelage started carving and printing in the family studio. Yoshida carved and printed his father’s designs.

 Yoshida’s first original designs date to the mid-1920s, and his career started in earnest in the late 1930s with a series of chuban-size landscapes that advanced his father’s style but demonstrated a sensitivity and flair for color that was all his own. In the 1950s, after the death of his father, the young Yoshida experimented with various styles and began working in abstraction concurrently producing highly representational designs. Like his father, Toshi Yoshida traveled the world in search of inspiration and produced a large body of work featuring foreign subjects. Yoshida’s diverse abilities as well as the spirit of experimentation set himself apart from his father, advancing his own style and artistic perspective, and bolstering the Yoshida family legacy.

In a decidedly modern landscape, the brash red morning light fills the sky as the dwindling lights of Ginza recede into memory. The composition is articulated in gray vertical and horizontal lines, almost giving the effect of an etching, leaving the city’s proud landscape in silhouette. The moment the artist captures is magic—the instant where the enticing lights of this lively nightlife center are flushed out, overpowered, by a new day and in particular the first new day of the year.

Connoisseur's Note

This work is a rare lifetime impression produced by the artist himself not a later posthumous impression done after his death. Lifetime impressions bear a live pencil signature at the bottom right margin, in contrast to the later one with stamp signatures that closely resemble pencilwork. Later impressions also showcase the name and information of the current publisher on the reverse, which this print lacks. This impression was never framed or displayed for extended periods of time ensuring the colors are in a pristine state of preservation, appearing as vivid today as they were the day the work was produced.