Making Modernism

Reed explores how sōsaku hanga —artist-designed woodblock prints—flourished in post-war Japan through American audiences rather than domestic institutions. Figures such as Onchi Kōshirō and Hiratsuka Un&s;ichi welcomed Occupation personnel into their cosmopolitan circles, presenting abstraction as a shared modernist language. Reed shows how Oliver Statler and James Michener promoted these prints in US publications and exhibitions, framing Japanese art ists as partners in global modernism. Far from embodying an isolated ‘ Japanese essence ’, sōsaku hanga became a site where Japanese printmakers tutored Americans in abstraction, reversing conventional East–West hierarchies and situating post-war Japanese art within international networks of modernist aesthetics.