Details

In Lyric on Musical Composition, Debussy, Golden Fish, Koshiro Onchi reimagines sound as visual form in a deeply personal and synesthetic meditation. Executed in 1936, this work belongs to his pivotal Musical Composition Lyric series—an innovative body of prints wherein the artist interprets music, poetry, and inner emotion through abstract visual language. Here, Debussy’s Poissons d’or becomes a point of departure for a composition both musical and modernist, where shimmering tonal gradations, elliptical forms, and dynamic interplay suggest the flickering movement of light on water and the elusive presence of golden-scaled fish.

Rather than attempt literal illustration, Onchi captures what he called “the atmosphere of sound.” Curved forms ripple outward from a luminous central axis, evoking vibration and fluid motion. The soft harmony of warm yellows, burnished golds, and cool greys summons the luminous play of scales and the mystery of aquatic life glimpsed in dream. There is no fixed narrative—only a shifting surface of feeling, rhythm, and sensation.

Connoisseur's Note

Golden Fish represents a major moment in Onchi’s evolution as the leading voice of Japanese abstraction and the Sosaku Hanga movement. Here, the artist fulfills the promise of self-expression (jiga) not through representation but through resonance—translating a Western musical composition into a visual idiom that is at once contemporary, lyrical, and distinctively Japanese. Onchi did not merely listen to Debussy; he entered the emotional and tonal world of the composition, rendering it in forms that float, pulse, and dissolve.

This work is a scarce self-printed impression, with a lively and subtle printing surface illustrating Onchi’s masterful hand at capturing emotion, inspiration, and experimentation. Collectors of 20th-century Japanese prints will recognize this work as a hallmark of Onchi’s mid-career modernism: technically experimental, emotionally intuitive, and formally assured. Rare and deeply poetic, this print bridges cultures, media, and modes of perception. It is not a portrait of a song, but a lyric born from it—etched in wood, colored in harmony, and offered in silence.