Torii Kotondo

Torii Kotondo (鳥居言人, 1900–1976) was a shin-hanga artist who produced some of the most refined and admired 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 in all, issued by the publishers Sakai-Kawaguchi, Kawaguchi, and later Ikeda. 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 Kuchibeni (Rouge) 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 fine hosho paper — produced a luminous, porcelain smoothness. The printing, executed by skilled block-cutters and printers, built up the layered color and textile detail through many separate impressions.

After 1933, Kotondo ceased designing woodblock prints entirely, devoting himself to his work for the Torii school, of which he became the eighth-generation head in 1941. 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.

Kotondo died in 1976. Because he produced so few print designs, and because wartime destruction and the passage of time have thinned the number of surviving impressions, his bijin-ga are now rare. His work is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the British Museum, among other collections.