<b>AMERICAN GIRL B</b>Toshi Yoshida1954$800</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. Through his diverse abilities and his spirit of experimentation, Yoshida set himself apart from his father, advancing his own style and artistic perspective and bolstering the Yoshida family legacy.

American Girl B is one of Yoshida’s designs produced directly in the wake of his father’s passing. This print is among the body of work that experimented with abstraction and simplification of form. In this work, Yoshida presents a bust of an American woman constructed in bifurcated and intersecting circles, ovals, and ellipses with a black background. Utilizing these shapes, the bust of the woman emerges in an elegant, simplified form. The artist filled portions of the shapes with fragments of colors. In the case of this print, Yoshida used reds and turquoise with white for the outlines that may invoke the colors of the American flag. This simplified bust has a striking appearance that recalls synthetic cubist painting from the early part of the last century.  

Connoisseur's Note

This work is a rare lifetime impression produced by the artist himself. At the time of this listing, no posthumous impressions of this design are known. 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.