Details

This extraordinary and rare early lithograph by Ay-O, titled Pastoral, is a kinetic vision of surreal bodily rhythms suspended in a saturated, dreamlike landscape. Printed in 1956, just prior to the artist’s international fame and eventual involvement with the avant-garde Fluxus movement, Pastoral captures a moment of creative emergence. The work bursts with undulating orange figures—both male and female—leaping, spinning, and orbiting beneath a sky rhythmically patterned with almond-shaped clouds. Their forms are exaggerated, abstracted, and wholly animated, as if suspended between dance and ritual.

The composition is both structured and ecstatic: a compressed plane of motion where repetition and variation imply a kind of ecstatic ceremony or cosmic harmony. It is worth noting that Pastoral predates the artist’s famed rainbow palette, but even here, Ay-O’s intuitive mastery of color and spatial dynamism is unmistakable. The burnt orange figures pulse against turquoise and yellow, suggesting not so much a rural idyll as a metaphysical one—a field of spiritual energy.

Connoisseur's Note

This impression of Pastoral is a rare survivor from Ay-O’s earliest experiments in lithography, executed in a tiny edition of only ten. Significantly, this print bears a personal dedication to Masuo Ikeda, Ay-O’s contemporary and fellow printmaker who would also rise to international prominence. The print is an intimate artifact of friendship and shared ambition within the postwar Japanese art world, when artists were rapidly reshaping Japan’s place in global modernism.

One of the more unusual elements of this impression is the presence of registration notches along the side margins—physical traces of Ay-O’s early printing process, before he developed techniques to align layers without visible marks. These notches are not damage, but intentional, historical remnants of the artist’s working method. The condition of the sheet is otherwise pristine, with brilliant color, crisp linework, and no signs of fading or handling. For collectors seeking foundational works that illustrate the early development of Ay-O’s visionary language, Pastoral offers not only aesthetic power but deep provenance and rarity.