Shiro Kasamatsu

Shiro Kasamatsu (笠松紫浪, 1898-1991) worked across both the shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga traditions during a career that stretched over seven decades, producing approximately 280 print designs distinguished by their atmospheric sensitivity to rain, snow, and night.

Born on January 11, 1898, in Asakusa, Tokyo, Kasamatsu entered the studio of Kaburagi Kiyokata at thirteen. Kiyokata's atelier was a training ground for the shin-hanga generation: Kasamatsu's fellow students included Kawase Hasui and Ito Shinsui. Though Kiyokata specialized in bijin-ga, Kasamatsu gravitated toward landscape and never departed from it. He exhibited paintings at the government-sponsored Bunten exhibitions during his years of training.

His printmaking career began in 1919 when Kiyokata introduced him to the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. His first commissioned design, "A Windy Day in Early Summer," launched a partnership that would define his shin-hanga period. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed Watanabe's workshop and nearly all pre-earthquake woodblocks, making Kasamatsu's earliest prints extremely rare. Across the full span of the partnership, from 1919 into the late 1940s, he produced roughly fifty designs for Watanabe, with the 1930s marking his most productive shin-hanga phase. "Shinobazu Pond" (1932) generated such sustained demand among Western collectors that it was reprinted for decades. "Great Lantern at Asakusa Kannon Hall" (1934) and "Spring Night: Ginza" (1934) further established his reputation for nocturnal and weather scenes, evoking atmosphere with extraordinary subtlety.

In the 1950s, Kasamatsu expanded beyond Watanabe. Between 1952 and 1960 he collaborated with the Kyoto publisher Unsodo, producing 102 prints including an Eight Views of Tokyo series. More significantly, he embraced the sosaku-hanga philosophy of self-designing, self-carving, and self-printing, producing a substantial body of self-published prints in limited editions. These were signed by the artist himself in Western fashion, unlike the workshop-applied signatures of his Watanabe editions. The sosaku-hanga prints revealed a more experimental aesthetic with stronger Western influences, focusing on landscapes and kacho-e bird-and-flower subjects.

His shin-hanga prints achieved their effects through rich color and atmospheric nuance, often in vertical compositions, while his later sosaku-hanga works displayed greater compositional freedom. In both modes, he excelled at evoking night, rain, and snow with a subtlety that invited comparison with Hasui while remaining distinctly his own.

He continued producing prints without seeking formal exhibition recognition well into his later years. He died on June 14, 1991, at ninety-three. His works are held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rijksmuseum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.