(untitled)

This untitled Japanese woodblock print by Hodo Nishimura is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, catalogued among the institution's substantial holdings of twentieth-century Japanese prints. The Art Institute has built one of the most significant [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) collections in North America through decades of gifts and purchases focused on the early and mid-twentieth-century revival of traditional Japanese printmaking. Nishimura was active within the shin-hanga, or 'new prints,' movement, which sought to revive the collaborative woodblock production process that had defined [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) while updating its visual vocabulary with subtle Western-influenced atmospheric effects. Shin-hanga publishers maintained workshops in which designers like Nishimura produced ink and watercolor drawings that were then translated by master carvers into multiple cherry-wood blocks, one for each color, and printed by hand on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) paper using rice-paste pigments and a [baren](/glossary/baren) burnisher. The untitled designation in the museum's catalogue often reflects sheets that arrived without their original publisher's label or that were issued as part of unbound albums in which individual titles were not given. Even without an established title, the print can be situated within Nishimura's typical range of subjects: domestic interiors, garden scenes, traditional figures, and Kyoto landmarks rendered in the calm, slightly nostalgic register that defined commercial shin-hanga during the mid-century. As a Japanese woodblock print preserved at the Art Institute, this sheet contributes to the institutional record of Hodo Nishimura's contribution to the shin-hanga tradition.