Japanese Woodblock Print, 1970s, self-published by Tomoo Inagaki

SIZE IN INCHES: 5 x 7 inches

TOMOO INAGAKI (1902-1980) is best known for his many prints of cats which gained him a wide following in the West, but the first of these was not produced until 1951 after nearly thirty years as a typical artist of the Creative Print Movement. He was obliged to make his living until that time by teaching and various sorts of commercial design work. He was born in Tokyo and graduated from the Okura Commercial High School in 1923; in the same year he began associating with Onchi Koshiro and Kiratsuka Un'ichi in the group producing the magazine Shi to hanga (Poetry and Prints), to which he first contributed in 1924, the same year that he began exhibiting at the Creative Print Association. From 1935 he taught commercial art at the Kyohoku Commercial High School, resigning in 1951 to become a teacher at the Japan Advertising Art School. He began to be widely known in the West through Statler's 'Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn' (1956), although he had participated widely in the traveling exhibitions to Europe and USA before World War II, and from then on was represented frequently in international exhibitions. His earlier works included many floral and still-life subjects, as well as landscapes and townscapes.

Fine, no flaws