SEKINO Jun'ichirō  関野凖一郎  (1914–1988)

Condition Report

Impression & Colours

Excellent. A crisp, well-inked impression with the colours in a remarkable state of preservation — the muted silver-grey outer band, the deep charcoal inner ground, the warm olive-gold of the kimono and leaf, the ivory karakusa scrollwork and face, and the deep vermilion of the obi, hair pom-poms and bird ornament are all fresh and cleanly registered. 

Paper

Very good. Full margins, no tears, no losses, no repairs. Light overall toning. Soft mat-burn tone lines visible on the recto around the image and echoed on the verso — the sheet was previously mounted behind a window mat but, as the retained colour saturation confirms, appears never to have been hung. Small tape residues survive at the corners of the verso from that earlier mounting.

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully. 

Painted Like a Festival Doll

Look at the face first. The stillness of it is the whole argument of the print. Enormous dark eyes fixed on nothing in particular, the small pursed pink mouth, the perfectly centred hairline, the entire body held rigid at the shoulders — Sekino is not painting a child so much as painting the way a Japanese festival doll (ningyō) looks when you take it out of its case. That is the point. In the same year he was drawing black boys in Harlem and Dutch girls in Marken as individuals with expressions and moods, he chose to paint his Japanese girl as an object of tradition. She stands in for a culture rather than in front of one.

The costume is calibrated for the reading. She wears a silk kimono patterned in ivory karakusa arabesque scroll over a warm olive-gold ground, cinched at the waist with a vermilion obi; the hair is dressed in an archaic style with a lacquered pillow-band and two silk kanoko pom-poms tied at the crown, with a strand of paper streamers falling at the temple. This is the coiffure of a very young girl on a festive day — Shichi-Go-San, or a New Year's shrine visit — and it is the same dress you will see on shelf-doll figures made by Kyoto craftsmen.

In her right hand she lifts a stylised bird perched on a broad leaf, held out on a slender stem like a small companion. Sekino frames the whole figure inside a black rectangular field surrounded by a smoky silver-grey aureole — the same framing device he used across the entire 1959–60 cycle, giving those internationally scattered children their consistent group identity. The palette is austere throughout: silver-grey, charcoal, cream, olive-gold, and one repeated note of vermilion carried by the obi, the pom-poms and the bird. Everything the sheet does, it does with those five colours.

The Cycle Comes Home

In 1958 Sekino was invited to the United States for a full year on an appointment coordinated by the Japan Society of New York and underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, teaching at Pratt Institute and Oregon State and travelling on through England, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. He returned to Tokyo with sketchbooks full of the children he had met on the road, and through 1959 and 1960 produced a linked group of woodblock portraits in a single stylised idiom — the same black rectangular framing, the same doll-like proportions, the same tightly-restricted palette. The known members of the cycle include Harlem Boy and Harlem Girl, Girl from Marken, Netherlands (also seen as Dutch Girl), Girl with Red Birds (the Parisian girl), Girl with Yellow Bird, Girl with Blue Bird, Girl with Black and White Bird (the rooster), and Girl with Birds Nest.

The present sheet is the counterpart at home. Sekino gave the same close, hushed attention he had given to children he had met as strangers to a subject drawn from his own culture — and, in a decision that reads sharper the longer you look at it, chose to stylise the Japanese subject harder than any of the foreign ones. There is no equivalent of the doll-like immobility in the Harlem portraits or the Marken girl. She is here as tradition sees a Japanese girl, not as Sekino himself did.

Unlike Sekino's numbered editions of the same years — x/100 pencilled in the margin — the girls-with-birds group was issued as an unlimited self-printed run on his own watermarked washi. This is confirmed by the composite lot offered at Bonhams on 14 September 2016, where a run of these girl-with-bird sheets, together with the Dutch girl and Girl of Olanda, was catalogued as "a group unlimited works featuring girls holding birds." The cycle was a personal project, made and given out at its maker's own tempo rather than pushed into an edition.

Sekino Jun'ichirō (1914–1988)

Sekino grew up in Aomori a few doors from Munakata Shikō, made his first prints while still at school, and joined the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai and the Ichimoku-kai (Onchi Kōshirō's circle of creative-print artists) in 1932. He trained in etching, lithography and oil painting alongside woodblock, took the Teiten Prize for etching in 1936, and moved to Tokyo in 1939, where he became Onchi's most rigorous pupil.

Through the late 1940s and 1950s he built his reputation on portraits: dense, psychologically exact heads of artists, Bunraku puppeteers, sumo wrestlers, maiko and children — his own and other people's. The 1958 American residency changed the scale of the practice by pointing it outward. Beginning with the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō in 1959 and running until 1974, Sekino's mature work turned to landscape and travel; the small cycle of foreign and domestic children to which the present print belongs sits at the pivot between the two phases of his career.

He received the Order of the Rising Sun in his final years. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Portland Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.