Ueno Tadamasa

Ueno Tadamasa (上野忠雅, 1904-1970), born Ueno Kitsumi (上野喜つ三), was a Japanese woodblock print artist whose career is inseparable from the world of Tokyo kabuki theatre. He is best known for his richly graphic ōban portraits of kabuki actors in classical roles — works that drew on the four-century-long visual tradition of the Torii painters who had supplied the kabuki theatres with signboards, programs, and yakusha-e (actor prints) since the late seventeenth century. Although his dates place him firmly within the era of the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) and shin-hanga (new print) movements, Tadamasa stood at a slight angle to both: his prints were not jiga-jikoku-jizuri sōsaku-hanga in the strict sense, since they were carved and printed by specialist craftsmen, and they were not quite shin-hanga in the Watanabe Shōzaburō landscape mode either. Instead, they are a twentieth-century revival of the Torii tradition of theatrical print design, produced in close collaboration with the actors and the playhouses of post-Meiji Tokyo, and aimed at an audience of kabuki connoisseurs as much as print collectors.

Tadamasa entered the Torii lineage by an unusual route. From an early age he was taken as a pupil by Torii Kiyotada VII (the seventh head of the Torii school in the modern reckoning), and as was customary in the lineage he received an artist name combining the syllable "tada" (忠), drawn from his teacher's name, with the personal element "masa" (雅 / 正). His training would have included the specific Torii skills of signboard painting (kanban-e), program design, and the bold, slightly exaggerated graphic vocabulary that the school had used for the kabuki theatres since the days of Torii Kiyonobu I in the late seventeenth century. The Torii were, in effect, the official painters of Edo kabuki, and the school survived the abolition of the daimyō system, the Meiji restructuring of the theatre world, and the early twentieth-century shifts in popular entertainment by maintaining a steady supply of artists trained inside the family workshop.

Tadamasa's adult career began in this signboard-and-program world rather than in the print room. He worked through the 1920s and 1930s as a designer for Tokyo kabuki houses, producing theatrical billboards and ephemeral printed matter, and his earliest surviving prints — including a small group of independent compositions dated to the 1930s such as the Sanbasō Dancer in the Ohmi Gallery collection — show him already at ease with the conventions of yakusha-e but working in a quieter, more painterly mode than the Torii tradition required. The crucial commission that shaped his print career came in 1940, when he met Watanabe Shōzaburō, the publisher who had built shin-hanga around landscape designers such as Kawase Hasui and Hiroshi Yoshida. Watanabe was looking to extend the shin-hanga model into the actor-print market, and Tadamasa was a natural choice: a young Torii-trained painter with theatrical connections, eager to revive the classical conventions of kabuki print design under a publisher who could supply first-class carvers and printers.