Landscape

Landscape carries the deliberate ambiguity of a title that could apply to any of Koizumi's topographic studies, and underscores how central the genre was to his practice. Working in oban or chuban formats, Koizumi cut every block himself in the sosaku-hanga manner, hand-burnishing the impressions with a baren on washi to retain the textural irregularities he prized. His training in Western-style oil and watercolor painting carried over into a measured tonal logic and atmospheric perspective rather than the flat color planes of earlier ukiyo-e. Working between the wars, he positioned himself between the publisher-driven shin-hanga revival and the artist-printed sosaku-hanga movement, sharing the topographic subject matter of figures like Hasui and Yoshida while insisting on full authorship of every stage of production. Most surviving Koizumi prints belong to his decade-long project Dai Tokyo Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo), 1928-1940, though he also worked outside that series in views of rural Japan.