Oda Kazuma

Oda Kazuma (織田一麿, 1882–1956) was a Tokyo-born painter, lithographer, and woodblock-print designer whose career straddled the two great currents of early-twentieth-century Japanese modern printmaking: the artisanal shin-hanga ('new prints') movement built around publisher commissions and the artist-driven sōsaku-hanga ('creative prints') movement that prized self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed work. Born in 1882 in Tokyo into a family with samurai roots, Oda studied Western-style painting (yōga) with Kawamura Kiyo-o (1852–1934), one of the most prominent first-generation yōga teachers in Japan, and learned the unusual specialty of lithography from his elder brother Oda Tōu, a painter and lithographer active in Osaka, and from Kaneko Masajirō, an Osaka-trained lithographer working from 1884 into the early 1900s. By 1903 he was working as a designer at the Koshiba lithography studio in Tokyo, where, around the same time, he is thought to have encountered the Prague-born painter-printmaker Emil Orlik (1870–1932), then immersed in his own study of Japanese woodblock methods; Orlik's combination of Western draftsmanship and an interest in printmaking as fine art seems to have helped shape Oda's lifelong commitment to the print as an autonomous expressive medium. Between 1916 and 1919 Oda produced two of the most ambitious lithograph series of the early Taishō period: the 'Collection of prints of scenes in Tokyo' (Tōkyō fūkei hanga-shū, 1916–17) and the 'Collection of prints of scenes in Osaka' (Ōsaka fūkei hanga-shū, 1917–19), depicting harbors, theaters, canals, geisha quarters, and night streets in soft tonalities and atmospheric grays that adapted European urban-view conventions to specifically Japanese subjects. In keeping with sōsaku-hanga principles he drew, transferred to stone, and printed these editions himself in small runs of roughly twenty to fifty impressions — strikingly modest numbers compared with the thousands of impressions a commercial Edo-style woodblock workshop could produce, and a clear declaration that he was treating the lithograph as a fine-art object rather than a mass commodity. On the strength of that work he became a founding member of the Nihon Sōsaku-Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Creative Print Association) at its establishment in 1918, serving as its sole representative of the lithographic medium within a circle otherwise dominated by woodblock artists — in effect the early movement's leading voice for lithography. During the 1920s Oda also worked across the aisle into shin-hanga, designing a small group of woodblock prints for publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885–1962); in 1924 he supplied six shin-hanga designs, which Watanabe's artisans carved and printed from Oda's paintings in the publisher's polished house style, showing how his painterly tonalism translated into the woodblock format. He continued to organize the field through the interwar decades, helping found the Yōfū Hangakai (Western-style Print Society) in 1929–30 — an offshoot devoted to print artists working from a yōga background — and then the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association) in 1931, the body that has remained the principal exhibiting society for Japanese fine-art printmaking down to the present. Beyond his own editions, Oda contributed to early Japanese print scholarship with books on ukiyo-e published in 1926 and 1931, helping establish a critical literature for the modern print in Japan, and in 1953 he opened a private workshop, the Oda Lithography Studio, in Tokyo, where he pursued lithography during his last years. He died in 1956. His prints are held in major public collections, including the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which holds his print 'Interior of a Cinema Theater.' Among collectors and historians Oda is valued as one of the very few Japanese modern artists of his generation to make lithography rather than woodblock his principal medium, and as a quiet but consequential bridge between sōsaku-hanga's experimental ethos and the more commercial machinery of shin-hanga publishing.

Oda Kazuma was active from 1882 to 1956. They were associated with the Shin-hanga and Sōsaku-hanga movements.

Oda Kazuma's work was shaped by the Shin-hanga and Sōsaku-hanga traditions in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Shin-hanga: ## What is Shin-hanga? Shin-hanga (新版画), literally "new prints," is the early twentieth-century revival of the collaborative Japanese woodblock workshop, organized between roughly 1915 and 1960 by the Tokyo publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885–1962) and a handful of competing houses. Sōsaku-hanga: ## What is sōsaku-hanga? Sōsaku-hanga (創作版画, "creative prints") was a twentieth-century Japanese print movement defined by a single commitment: the artist must design, carve, and print every work alone.

Oda Kazuma's prints frequently feature urban scenes, landscapes, abstract, lithograph, rivers & lakes, night scenes.

Original prints by Oda Kazuma can be found in collections including The Art of Japan, Japanese Art Open Database, Hara Shobo, Art Institute of Chicago.