Yoshida Chizuko, Retrospective

by Matthew Kangas

Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Continuing through January 4, 2026

Yoshida Chizuko, “Shoreline,” 1950, oil on canvas, 31 3/16 x 25 9/16 x 1 1/16”. All images courtesy of the Portland Art Museum and the Estate of Yoshida Chizuko.

This retrospective of Japanese painter and printmaker Yoshida Chizuko (1924-2017) coincides with the museum’s acquisition of 80 works by the postwar artist. Accompanied by an international symposium in October, a full-length color monograph, and related educational activities, the exhibition manifests a broad effort to place Yoshida within American art history, Japanese modernism, and the global phenomenon of contemporary printmaking. The museum’s curator of Asian art, Jeannie Kenmotsu, has researched the artist thoroughly and makes a strong case for her significance on a number of levels. There is her pioneering role as a woman artist in a male-dominated art culture; her presence in a dynastic printmaking family that she married into, the Yoshida clan (whose works are included); her ties to international modernism, including European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism; and her achievements elevating complicated printmaking techniques which often overlapped with her abstract paintings in the early 1950s. Later, she confronted Pop Art and Op Art. Examples of all of these facets are included.

Yoshida Chizuko, “My World,” 1949, oil on canvas, 25 9/16 x 31 1/2 x 7/8”.

It is hard to overstate the challenges and prejudices Yoshida faced as a female artist, especially once she began to be admitted to formerly all-male competitive exhibitions that were made co-educational with the introduction of Japan’s post-war constitution. Prizewinning led to membership invitations in the Pacific Painting Society, an important avant-garde group of painters and printmakers, and the Vermillion Leaf Society of women artists. However, Yoshida had to face continued affronts such as the vandalism of one of her exhibited paintings, “Thaw” (1950). Curator Kenmotsu discreetly suggests that the defacing might have been due to the work’s abstract quality, not just the gender of the artist.

As a teenager Yoshida wanted to become a dancer, but health concerns pushed her toward art classes instead. As the earliest works here, “Song of the Sea” (1948) and “Shoreline” (1950), suggest, she was completely comfortable combining representational views of nature with geometric and abstract imagery, a development that placed her at odds with many traditional art groups at the time. Fortunately, her marriage to Yoshida Hodaka in 1953 gained her entry into his elite, wealthy family with in-laws who were artists and innovators in woodblock printmaking. Before that, however, she had committed (in her 1948 diary) to following the “path of the avant-garde.” For the next 60 years she remained committed to this course.

Yoshida Chizuko, “Rainy Day, Blue,” 1954, color woodblock print on paper, 9 7/8 x 14 3/4”.

In 1957, with her husband and mother-in-law, Fujio, Yoshida’s first trip abroad took her to the University of Oregon, where she was exposed to lithography. “Things I Picked Up in the Desert” dates from their residency in Eugene. Its scribbles and impressions of cactus and long-horned cattle confirm her affinity for the varied American landscape, something she would return to repeatedly over the years.

While the earliest, pre-Yoshida clan paintings might appear derivative of European modernists such as Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky, this is no less true of work from this time by other continental American artists who, in lieu of traveling, took their cues from esoteric art publications. Nonetheless, “My World” (1949) and “Title unknown (Rainy Day)” (1954) are bold formal constructions with spontaneous, improvisatory marks and striking color combinations. Yoshida was a quick study who left oil painting behind to pursue the woodblock discipline of the family she had married into.

Yoshida Chizuko, “Jama Masjid,” 1960, color woodblock print on paper, 18 5/8 x 13 1/2”.

After Eugene, the couple, along with Fujio (who acted as translator) continued on a year-long trip around the world, touching all the bases and world capitals still popular with Japanese tourists today: Paris, Rome, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India. Many of the artist’s color woodblock prints (some of which combine collagraphs, lithographs, and photo-etchings) recalled the artist’s stays in Seattle, Southwest Arizona, Venice (“Lido—Venice”), Greece (“Mediterranean Sea”) and India, especially vivid abstractions of “Red Fort,” “Jama Masjid” and “Impressions from India” (all 1960).

While Yoshida’s most commercially successful artworks involved variations on her butterfly imagery, more challenging works that were daringly subjective such as “My Inner Self No. 2” (1961) and “Red Whirlpool” (1964) strengthen the case for her stature as an artist who crossed the hyper-traditional boundaries of Japanese printmaking. One need only regard her father-in-law Hiroshi’s 1931 print of the Taj Mahal to see the distance she had to travel as an avant-garde artist, as a woman artist in Japan, and as the daughter-in-law within a family of well-known artists.

Later works that attempt to emulate Pop Art, Op Art, and Minimalism are less convincing visually but commendable for their valiant efforts at transforming the tightly structured medium in which she chose to work. Areas left uninked, called “blind embossing” or intaglio, do their best to accentuate the basic starting point of Yoshida’s work: the blank page about to enter the press.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.