Other Shin Hanga Artists (1912–1989)
Ito Shinsui (1898-1972）
Ito Shinsui is best known for his Shin Hanga portraits of beautiful women, often in three-quarter figure compositions. But during his career he produced several memorable, and memorably tonal, landscapes.
Born in 1898 in a fast-modernizing Japan, he started work as a factory worker before his obvious talent got him promoted to the design department. Later, his paintings caught the eye of Watanabe Shozaburo, who added him to his roster of Shin Hanga stars. From this point on, beautiful women were almost Shinsui’s entire repetoire, although during World War II he did travel to Indonesia to produce designs depicting life there. His remarkable life spanned a tumultuous time indeed, and he died in 1972.
Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950)
From middle school in Kyushu to travelling the globe.
Little Hiroshi Ueda was only 15 when Kasaburo Yoshida, his art teacher in Fukuoka, recognized his talent. So what did he do? He adopted him. Soon enough, young Hiroshi was studying painting in the fast-moving whirl of Meiji Tokyo, a world away.
But that was only the beginning. In time the young man would rise to fame as a Shin Hanga (New Print) master, focusing mostly on landscapes, second in reputation only to Kawase Hasui. But unlike Hasui, who’s views were all set in Japan, Yoshida travelled the world to find compositions and to learn and experiment with Western painting techniques. His fine eye would capture scenes as disparate as the Matterhorn, Venice, The Golden Temple in Rangoon – even Pittsburgh, a gritty industrial city that he would imbue with smoky mystery and romance.
And it wasn’t only his designs that focused on the West. Yoshida was also one of the first Japanese woodblock print artists to gain a reputation beyond Japan.
At first, it was his paintings that were recognized. He had a show at the Detroit Museum of Art in 1899, one in Paris in 1900 and had his work featured at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1903, among other places.
Back in Japan, when he was 44, Yoshida met a man who’d have as big an effect on his career as his middle school art teacher -- Shōzaburō Watanabe, the father of Shin Hanga. Watanabe published several of Yoshida’s works, but their partnership was cut short when his workshop was destroyed in the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Nonetheless, the die was cast. That same year, Yoshida again visited the United States and noticed the burgeoning interest in Japanese prints – and all things Japanese.
He returned home and put together his own studio. His firm control of the process -- from preparatory sketch to final printing -- was one reason his prints have such a singular quality; there is nothing quite like them. Another is his painterly approach. Some works appear almost as if they fell off the tip of a watercolor brush, while others have the muscular values of oils. Looking at his many paintings and then his print designs, it’s easy to see how one grew into the other.
Yoshida started something of a family dynasty. His wife Fujio was a talented painter and printmaker, as was his elder son, Toshi, and his wife, Kiso. His younger son, Hodaka – named for Hiroshi Yoshida’s favorite mountain -- was a modernist designer in the Sosako Hanga print movement in the 20th Century, as were his wife and daughter.
Hiroshi Yoshida’s first editions are usually (but not always) identified by his pencil-drawn signatures and the jizuri (self-printed) seal, usually in the upper left margin. Other scholars and dealers have shared a few interesting tidbits. One is that it was his wife who signed the prints for Western export (prints to be sold in Japan didn’t have a hand-drawn signature), and the other is that his key blocks were made of zinc, so they never wore down.
Hiroshi Yoshida died on April 15, 1950, leaving behind a legacy in art and artists. His key blocks will never fade, nor will his wondrous body of work.
Koson Ohara (1877-1945)
Koson Ohara was famous as a master of kacho-e (bird-and-flower) designs. Throughout a prolific career, in which he created around 500 prints, he went by three different titles: Ohara Hoson, Ohara Shoson and Ohara Koson.
At first, he worked with publishers Akiyama Buemon (Kokkeido) and Matsuki Heikichi (Daikokuya), signing his work Koson. Starting around 1926, he became associated with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, and signed his work Shoson. He also worked with the publisher Kawaguchi, signing his works Hoson.
Through his association with Watanabe, Ohara's work was exhibited abroad, and his prints sold well, particularly in the United States.
Takahashi Shotei (1871-1945)
Takahashi Shotei may have once been the most well-known Japanese woodblock print artist in the world, even if the Westerners who bought stacks of his prints when they flooded Japan in the early part of the 20th Century didn’t know his name.
Watanabe Shozaburo hired him to design shinsaku-hanga (souvenir prints) to fulfill tourists’ demand for Ukiyoe-style woodblock landscape prints similar to those created in the past by masters of that genre, especially Hiroshige. These prints sold extremely well to this new audience, and were often in unusual sizes, to striking effect. (We wonder what Hiroshige would have thought of them.)
Shotei eventually took the name Hiroaki and produced hundreds of designs, but the blocks were destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. This is when Watanabe assigned him the unusual task of recreating his own works. He lived until 1945.
Kasamatsu Shiro (1898-1991)
Shiro Kasamatsu studied art with the painter Kaburagi Kiyokata beginning when he was very young, focusing at first on portraits of beautiful women. Watanabe Shozaburo saw his paintings in a show in 1919 and added him to his stable of Shin Hanga stars.
Shiro quickly gained renown for his landscapes of famous landmarks — always with a romantic sheen — and his scenes of traditional Japanese life. Later, up until 1960, he worked with the Kyoto publisher Unsodo, creating more than 100 designs. Hints of old Japan are juxtaposed with modernity in Shiro’s work — a tiny sushi stall in the foreground, for example, is dwarfed by modern, neon-lit buildings in the background, or, as in “Great Lantern at the Kannon Temple,” a man in a western fedora descends the steps from this most traditional of Japanese landmarks.
One of the last Shin Hanga designers, Shiro eventually experimented with sosaku hanga — creative prints — in which the artist carved and printed his own designs.
Tsuchiya Koitsu (1870-1949)
For Tsuchiya Koitsu, in a sense, life began at 60. That’s when he met Shozaburo Watanabe and started publishing designs with him. Decades earlier, he’d been a student of the legendary Ukiyoe master Kobayashi Kiyochika for 19 years — even living in his house — and was known for his dramatic triptyches portraying the Sino-Japanese War of the 1890s. In the end it was his work with Watanabe that gained him fame, and his particularly modern appreciation of water reflections and light effects.
Torii Kotondo (1900-1976)
Torii Kotondo started in the footsteps of his father, Torii Kiyotata IV, seventh head of the Torii school of Ukiyoe, focusing on prints of kabuki actors (yakusha-e), as well as working on stage design and production. In 1929 he succeed his father as head of the school. At the same time, he is known for his pictures of beautiful women (bjin), of which he produced 21.
Most of Kotondo's woodblock prints date from 1927 to 1933. But that was only a fraction of his life’s work. He was extremely prolific, producing paintings as well as prints and stage designs, and later in life became a university lecturer. Finally, he worked as an art consultant for television and films. What a journey: from Ukiyoe to moving pictures.
Kobayakawa Kiyoshi (1899-1948)
Kobayakawa Kiyoshi was born in Fukuoka, in northern Kyushu, but his designs have helped to define the Tokyo metropolis of the 1920s and early 1930s when Japan entered a unique and vibrant epoch, beginning with the Taishō Era (named like all such eras for the Emperor) and continuing into the early Showa period. One of the most visible signs of this rapid change in Japan were the “modern girls” – or Mogas – who paraded down the Ginza in flapper styles, who enjoyed cocktails and music, who strayed from the traditional roles of wife and mother and dutiful daughter-in-law.
Kiyoshi, who only made 13 prints, captured these snazzy young women in several famous designs, especially "Tipsy,” which shows one in a colorful polka dot dress with a marcel wave in her hair enjoying what appears to be an Aviation cocktail, a cherry floating happily within. It is among the most famous of all Shin Hanga works.
One reason for Kiyoshi’s limited print output was the fact that, for the most part, he was a painter. He won numerous awards for Japanese-style paintings before becoming interested in prints in the 1920s.
We’re lucky he did. For a fleeting instant, he captured a moment when the old and new felt balanced. In just a few years, fascism and darkness would wipe away the Mogas like they’d been a dream.
Charles W. Bartlett (1860-1940)
Talk about a fascinating life.
Charles William Bartlett was born in England, studied in Paris, and became a renowed watercolorist. After the tragic deaths of his wife and son, he travelled the world for two years with his second wife, ending up in Japan in 1915. Here he met Watanabe Shozaburo, who published 21 woodblocks from Bartlett's designs in 1916, including six prints of Japanese landscapes. Bartlett’s designs of India, where he’d spent time during his journey, are said to have inspired the Indian designs of Hiroshi Yoshida.
In time, Bartlett and his wife left Japan for Hawaii, where they lived permanently from then on. He returned to Japan one more time, in 1919, where he did more work with Watanabe. These included noted designs of Hawaiian surfers. Interestingly, Bartlett essentially hired Watanabe to publish his prints, instead of the other way around, and kept ownership of the blocks. They remain in Hawaii to this day.
Elizabeth Keith (1887-1956)
Elizabeth Keith was one of the rare Western artists in the Shin Hanga or “New Print” movement, and one of even fewer women. Her designs were clean and elegant, with a subtle pallette, and found considerable popularity in Europe at a time when the Western world was fascinated by Asia and all-things-Japan.
Born in Scotland, she first travelled to Japan when she was 28 and stayed for nine years, beginning her career as a professional artists by exhibting her watercolors. But Japan was merely her home base: she travelled often to China and Korea, countries for whom she seemed to have a strong affinity, and it is the designs she created depicting those countries that are her most renowned today.
Interestingly, they were never produced in great numbers, and are thus quite expensive and sought-after.
Bannai Kokan (1900-1962)
Born in Fukushima prefecture in 1900, Kokan studied Japanese-style painting with Bannai Seiran, eventually pivoting to Shin Hanga prints. He began but never completed a series of prints of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido in in the early 1930s.
