Kuseyama

Kuseyama refers to a mountain locality that Hakutei encountered during his travels through regional Japan, the kind of subject he favored over the more frequently depicted urban or classical meisho. The print would render the mountain's silhouette and surrounding terrain through bokashi gradations in the sky, with the mountain mass handled through carved keyblock outlines and tonal blocks of subdued color. Hakutei's mountain subjects characteristically reflect the influence of his yoga (Western-style) painting training under Kuroda Seiki at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, with attention to atmospheric perspective and tonal range that draws as much from European landscape painting as from the meisho-e tradition. As a founding member of the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai (1918), Hakutei treated such regional landscape subjects with the artist-led sensibility of the creative-print movement, even when produced through the collaborative shin-hanga model — a duality that defined his position bridging the two Japanese print movements of the early twentieth century.