In 1966-67, the American artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright created the Haiga Portfolio, while working in Kyoto, Japan. The series of experimental prints offer visual interpretations of haiku by seven Japanese poets including Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. Macdonald-Wright felt the immediacy of the haiku poem could serve as a model for the abstract painting he was interested in developing: It was a form that could quickly get to an essential truth while omitting extraneous detail. In the 20 colorful, quasi-abstract woodblock prints we see Macdonald-Wright revisiting the early 20th century European ideal of making visible relationships between color, abstraction and feeling. The result is a visually spectacular proto-psychedelic series testing the relationship between words and images. 

Pictured: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, The Spring Sea Swelling and Falling all the Day, 1966–1967, Woodblock print on mulberry paper, 16 x 20 in.