Junʼichirō Sekino
準一郎關野
Japanese, 1914–1988
Rooftops of Nagoya, 1963
Woodblock
Gift of D. Lee Rich, P’78 ’80 and John Hubbard Rich, Jr., Class of 1939 Litt.D. 1974, P’78 ’80
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.