From the Flat Files: Yuichi HASEGAWA's Twin Moons

Yuichi HASEGAWA (1945–2025)

Twin Moons, 2007

Woodblock print

Edition of 10

12.5 × 15 inches

I'm starting a new series on this blog called From the Flat Files, in which I'll be opening the drawers where I keep my prints and pulling out some of the wonderful pieces that I particularly love and think deserve a closer look. Think of this series as pulling up a chair beside me as I open a drawer and share a little art, a little history, and perhaps a story or two.

The first print I've chosen is Twin Moons, a 2007 woodblock by Yuichi HASEGAWA, an artist whose work has been part of The Tolman Collection for decades and whose friendship meant a great deal to our family.

Look at those two wonderful silver-white moons, one near the top and the other lower down, seemingly floating in a sea of turquoise, deep green, beige, and pale yellow-green. Around them is an extraordinary jumble of shapes and textures, almost like sparks flying in every direction. There are little touches of lavender and even two fine red diagonal lines that seem to shoot across the composition. The whole thing feels wonderfully alive.

But what I find especially clever is the way Hasegawa has organized all this apparent chaos. Look closely and you'll see that the composition is divided into distinct rectangular areas, with one moon emerging from a dark field and the other appearing higher up, partially hidden among the intricate patterns. There is a very deliberate structure beneath all that exuberance. And then there is the surface itself. Those silvery moons have a textured, almost shimmering quality that is difficult to convey in a photograph.

To me, Twin Moons is both mysterious and celebratory. It speaks to me of autumn. It has something of the quiet contemplation of nature that Hasegawa loved, but it also has an exuberance that speaks to me.

Hasegawa-san came to us through a rather wonderful introduction. Kiyoshi SAITO, one of the great figures of modern Japanese printmaking and a longtime friend of my parents, told them in the late 1980s about a fellow artist from his hometown of Aizu in Fukushima Prefecture. Saito was not a man who casually recommended other artists, so when he suggested that we take a look at someone making woodblocks unlike anything he'd seen before, my parents paid attention.

Hasegawa-san was a fascinating printmaker, in part because he took a medium that most people associate with the flat, carefully delineated colors of traditional Japanese woodblocks and made it do something quite different. His prints have depth, texture, and an almost mysterious luminosity. They often seem to exist somewhere between abstraction and landscape; between something you recognize and something you simply feel.

One of the things I particularly appreciate about Hasegawa-san's prints is that they reward close inspection. His family was involved in making lacquer products, and he incorporated some of that knowledge into his art, using lacquer and metallic pigments to create surfaces that catch and reflect light in unexpected ways. A photograph can give you an idea of the composition, but it doesn't always convey what happens when you stand in front of the actual print and move slightly to one side. The surface changes. Something that appeared subdued suddenly comes alive.

He also worked with a technique called reduction woodblock printing, which is a rather unforgiving way to make a print. Instead of carving a separate block for each color, the artist works from a single block, printing one color, carving away more of the surface, printing the next color, and continuing until the image is complete. Hasegawa-san could repeat this process as many as twenty times, creating remarkable depth and texture from a single piece of wood. By the end, much of the original block has literally disappeared. There is no going back.

And this brings me to another reason Twin Moons is such a special print. It was produced in an edition of just ten. Now that Hasegawa-san is no longer with us, the number of his works available to collectors is necessarily finite. Having represented his work through The Tolman Collection for decades, I can tell you from firsthand experience that his lunar images have always been among his most sought-after prints. There is something about the way he interpreted the moon, sometimes mysterious, sometimes almost otherworldly, that collectors respond to again and again. Twin Moons, with its wonderfully vibrant colors and extraordinarily small edition, is a particularly collectible example. But technique and rarity are only part of the story.

Hasegawa-san lived and worked in Aizu, far from the bustle of Tokyo. When I visited him last, he had taken over an abandoned schoolhouse and turned it into his studio. I remember walking through the corridors, looking at the wonderfully generous amount of space he had to work in, and noticing his brushes and paint cans arranged in neat rows. Compared with the often cramped studios of artists working in Tokyo, it was quite something.

He was deeply connected to the natural world around him, and that connection was central to his work. He spoke of his interest in Zen and of wanting to express the power and splendor of nature. I think you can feel that in his prints. They aren't literal descriptions of scenery so much as meditations on what it feels like to experience it.

There was also a very sweet, personal side to our relationship with Hasegawa-san. Aizu is famous for its persimmons, and every autumn he would send boxes of them to the gallery. At New Year's, he would send each of us a small woodblock print that he had made especially to mark the occasion and wish us well for the coming year. These little gifts became part of our family traditions, and they are among the things I remember so fondly about him.

I think this is something that sometimes gets lost when we talk about collecting art. We discuss technique, editions, condition, provenance, and value, all of which are important, of course. But behind every print is a human being, with a particular way of looking at the world, a particular history, and, if you're lucky enough to know the artist, a collection of memories that make the work even more meaningful, and that you can share with collectors of his work.

Hasegawa-san passed away in 2025, and I find myself looking at his prints with an added sense of affection now. I miss knowing that he is somewhere in his wonderful old schoolhouse, working on the next image, experimenting with another surface, or finding yet another way to capture the light of the moon.

I'll be returning to the flat files again soon to see what else catches my eye. There are plenty of treasures waiting in those drawers, and I'm looking forward to sharing them with you.