The Holy Family

Watanabe Sadao was one of the most famous printmakers of the Creative Print (sosakuhanga) movement, which emphasized that the artist should be involved in the entire printmaking process from the design to the finished product. Watanabe studied with two of the great founders of the Japanese Folk Art (mingei) movement, Yanagi Soetsu (1889–1961) and Serizawa Keisuke (1895–1984), who believed that humble objects could be beautiful.

Prints by Watanabe, who converted to Christianity at the age of eighteen, depict scenes from the Old and New Testaments. His simple and stylized treatment of forms evokes East Asian folk prints while also recalling the segmented designs of Western stained-glass windows, where such biblical scenes are commonplace.

Watanabe prints over momigami, a type of paper crumpled by hand, squeezed, and wrinkled to give it an irregular texture. Each sheet of paper is dyed with a rich background color, and then printed with a stencil-print technique traditionally used in dyeing fabrics. The resulting works demonstrate a rough simplicity associated with folk art.