Fujimori Shizuo

was a Japanese woodblock artist associated with the sōsaku-hanga (creative prints) movement. His style was strongly influenced by Expressionism.

Fujimori was born in 1891 in Kurume, Fukuoka prefecture. He studied Western-style art (yōga) with the Hakuba-kai ("White Horse Society") in 1910, and the next year enrolled in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from where he graduated in 1916. At the school he met Onchi Kōshirō with whom he collaborated on Tsukuhae ("Moonglow"), a print and poetry magazine, producing 37 prints. He studied yōga with the Hakuba-kai ("White Horse Society") in 1910, where he met Kyokichi Tanaka, and the next year enrolled in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from where he graduated in 1916. Fujimori also studied with the yōga painters Kuroda and Fujishima, but drew his inspiration from Aoki. In March 1916, during his formative years, he made a self-portrait in the yōga manner that shows a competent mastery of the academic style taught at the school, a figurative realism markedly different from the radical expressionist designs he was exploring alongside Onchi and Tanaka for Tsukuhae. After a period teaching in Fukuoka and Taiwan, in 1922 he moved to Tokyo to pursue a career as a professional artist in the fields of painting, printmaking and illustration. Throughout his career Fujimori contributed to several dōjin zasshi (coterie magazines), including Shi to Hanga (1922–25), Kaze (1927–28), Bijutsu-han (1932–34), Han Geijutsu (1932–36) and Kasuri (1934–36), and was a founding member of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai in 1931.

He provided thirteen prints for the seminal sōsaku hanga series One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo hyakkei) of 1929–32, and produced his own series, Twelve Views of Great Tokyo (Dai Tokyo Junikei), in 1933–34.

He returned to live in Iizuka in 1939, and died on 28 May 1943, the year after the sudden death of his eldest son. Fujimori's first print, Imōto wa Yaminu (October 1914), also published in Tsukuhae volume II, likewise takes up these themes: here illness serves as the explicit subject of the small woodcut (196 × 91 mm), in which a nun is shown lying as though a corpse, her hands resting on her chest and her feet crossed, while her brother sits bent over her in anguish; flowing lines are carved on either side of a central brown band, and a flock of black birds flies over her prone body in a symbolic inverted "S" formation, her body not firmly fixed in space, as though it might float along the brown band, or river, into oblivion.

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