March, from Calendar Prints by Important Sōsaku-Hanga Artists

This 1937 colour woodblock print is the March sheet from a calendar series produced jointly by important sōsaku-hanga artists of the period, in which different months were assigned to different printmakers to design a year-long cycle of seasonal images. Katsuhira Tokushi's March sheet treats the early-spring scene with the careful structural draughtsmanship and restrained colour palette characteristic of his late-1930s work, contributing to the calendar an unmistakably Akita-inflected reading of the slowly receding northern winter. Such collaborative calendars were an important format of the pre-war sōsaku-hanga movement, allowing the loose association of printmakers connected through the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai and related groups to circulate their work to a broader audience of collectors and patrons. The print is one of the earlier dated examples of Katsuhira's work in the WBP (Asian Collection Internet Auction) reference database and shows the artist's emerging maturity at the moment of his first significant exposure beyond his native Akita.