Hawaiian Fishes – B

Toshi Yoshida was a Japanese printmaker and painter. He is best known for his association with the sosaku-hanga movement in the early 20th century. The movement’s principles involved the idea that a single artist would draw, carve, and print his own works, rather than dividing the tasks for assistants to carry out. Born on July 25, 1911 in Tokyo, Japan, his father was the famed landscape artist Hiroshi Yoshida. Toshi learned much of his technique from his father and at 19 went on a sketching trip to India and Southeast Asia with him. In 1950, after the death of his father, Toshi distinguished himself by creating abstract works for the first time. “It was an easy—I suppose inevitable—step to abstraction, but it was a step my father could never approve,” he said of his work. “Still I could not ignore the movement of the times and I began to break away from my former realistic approach.” He went on to make over 300 of these non-objective woodblock prints. The artist died at 93 years old on July 1, 1995 in Tokyo, Japan. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.