Kishio Koizumi

Kishio Koizumi (小泉癸巳男, 1893–1945) occupied a singular position between the shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga movements, combining the topographic subject matter of the former with the self-reliance of the latter. He designed, carved, and printed every block himself — fulfilling the sōsaku-hanga ideal of the artist as sole creator — yet his subjects were the temples, bridges, rivers, and modern landmarks of Tokyo that belonged to the shin-hanga landscape tradition. That synthesis culminated in his masterwork, the series One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Shōwa Era (Shōwa Dai-Tōkyō Hyaku Zue), produced between 1928 and 1940.

Born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1893, Koizumi studied Western-style painting and worked in oil and watercolor — training that included study under Ishii Hakutei and Maruyama Banka at the Japan Watercolour Institute — before gravitating toward printmaking; he joined the Japan Creative Print Association (Nihon Sōsaku Hanga Kyōkai) in 1919. He settled in Tokyo and immersed himself in the city's rapid modernization, much of it a rebuilding of the districts leveled by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, watching steel-frame office buildings and concrete bridges replace the wooden structures depicted by earlier artists. The One Hundred Views series captured that transformation in real time: early prints depict canal-side warehouses and wooden torii gates, while later entries show the streamlined ferro-concrete of the rebuilt Nihonbashi district and other newly risen modern landmarks.

Koizumi's technique balanced precision with atmospheric mood. He carved fine lines that defined architectural edges cleanly, then layered translucent color washes to evoke weather and time of day — fog over the Sumida River, twilight behind the silhouette of Sensōji's pagoda, rain slanting across the iron girders of a railway bridge. His palette leaned toward cool blues, muted greens, and warm grays, with occasional punches of vermillion on shrine gates and autumn maple leaves.

Working over twelve years, Koizumi handled every stage of the series' production and distribution himself, selling prints directly and through a small network of dealers sympathetic to the sōsaku-hanga cause. He completed the hundred designs in 1940 and afterward added nine further prints, bringing the finished set to one hundred and nine.

His work attracted renewed scholarly attention in the later twentieth century as historians recognized that the One Hundred Views series constitutes an irreplaceable visual document of interwar Tokyo, much of which was obliterated by wartime firebombing in 1945. Prints from the series are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.