Takasawa Keiichi

Keiichi Takasawa (高沢圭一, 1914–1984) was a Japanese painter and woodblock-print designer whose mature career was devoted almost exclusively to bijin-ga, the genre of "pictures of beautiful women." His prints sit on the late-shin-hanga side of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking — produced in collaboration with publisher-coordinated carvers and printers rather than self-cut and self-pulled in the sōsaku-hanga manner — but their pencil-signed, limited-edition format and their cool, modernized handling of the female figure place him within the postwar interest in updating classical bijin-ga subjects for a contemporary audience. Born in Gunma Prefecture in 1914, he entered Nihon University in 1936 but left before completing his studies. In 1939 he received the Asahi Award for one of his paintings, an early mark of national recognition. During the Pacific War he worked as a war reporter, an assignment that interrupted but did not end his independent practice; after 1945 he supported himself primarily through commercial illustration for women's magazines while continuing to paint bijin-ga in his studio. His female subjects are characteristically slender, with elongated necks, refined features, and cool, restrained palettes — a modernized, decorative treatment of a subject with a long history in Japanese art; it is widely believed that the recurring model in many of his works was his wife. His woodblock prints were made by professional carvers and printers in the older shin-hanga division of labor and issued through two studios in particular: Yūyūdō, the best-known publisher of his pencil-signed limited editions and the source of most of the sheets that circulate today, and Katō Hanga Kenkyūsho. Within the postwar print landscape Takasawa belongs to a strand of "new bijin-ga" designers whose work descended from shin-hanga rather than from the more iconoclastic sōsaku-hanga lineage. Individual sheets such as "Arrow Feather Pattern" (Yagasuri), "Hair," and the abstract-titled "Number 1" and "Number 2" demonstrate the basic vocabulary of his bijin-ga prints: a single woman, often seen from waist or shoulder up, set against a flat tonal field that throws the kimono pattern and the cool oval of the face into relief. In 1974 and 1975 he held two exhibitions in Paris, which raised his international visibility and helped build the small but stable European market for his pencil-signed prints. He died in 1984 at the age of seventy. Major institutional holdings of his work are not well documented in the English-language literature, and the precise chronology of individual print editions remains imperfectly fixed across sources; he is best represented in private collections and through dealer archives such as JAODB and the Ohmi Gallery's Takasawa Keiichi collection, which together preserve a substantial portion of his print output.

Takasawa Keiichi was active from 1914 to 1984.

Original prints by Takasawa Keiichi can be found in collections including Japanese Art Open Database, Ohmi Gallery.