Torii Kotondo

Torii Kotondo (鳥居言人, 1900–1976) was a shin-hanga artist who produced some of the most refined and sought-after bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) of the twentieth century, despite an extraordinarily small print output. Born Saito Akira in Tokyo in 1900, he was adopted into the illustrious Torii school of kabuki poster painters and became the eighth-generation head of the Torii lineage, assuming the professional name Torii Kiyotada V for his kabuki work. His woodblock prints, designed under the separate name Kotondo, represent an entirely distinct facet of his artistic career.

Kotondo studied nihonga painting under Kiyokata Kaburagi, the same master who trained Ito Shinsui and other leading shin-hanga figure artists. Under Kiyokata's guidance he absorbed the traditions of ukiyo-e bijin-ga and developed the exacting draftsmanship that would define his prints. Between 1929 and 1933, he designed just twenty-one woodblock prints for the publisher Ikeda, plus a small number for Sakai and Kawaguchi. These few designs — collectively known as his bijin-ga series — achieved a level of elegance that places them among the supreme achievements of the shin-hanga movement.

The prints depict women in intimate, quiet moments: applying makeup before a mirror, combing wet hair after a bath, adjusting a kimono collar, sheltering under an umbrella in falling snow. Kesho (Makeup), Kami (Hair Combing), and Kuchi-e (Lipstick) are among the most celebrated. Kotondo rendered kimono textiles with painstaking attention to pattern and weave, and his treatment of skin — achieved through multiple impressions of dilute pigment on the finest hosho paper — produced a luminous, porcelain smoothness unmatched by his contemporaries. The printing, executed by master craftsmen at the Ikeda workshop, employed as many as thirty separate woodblocks per image to build up the layered color and textile detail.

After 1933, Kotondo ceased designing woodblock prints entirely, devoting himself to his hereditary duties as head of the Torii school. He spent the remaining decades of his career painting kabuki signboards, theatrical programs, and traditional Torii-school billboards for the Kabuki-za theater in Tokyo. He received the Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions to preserving this theatrical art form.

Kotondo died in 1976. Because he produced so few print designs, and because wartime destruction and the passage of time have reduced surviving impressions, his prints command exceptional prices at auction. First editions of Kesho and Kuchi-e are among the most valuable twentieth-century Japanese prints in the market. His work is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Scholten Japanese Art collection.