1966 Autumn Catalog

Maki Haku's 1966 Autumn Catalog is a cover design produced for the Red Lantern Shop, the long-running Tokyo dealership that championed contemporary Japanese printmakers to an international audience in the postwar decades. The image, recorded by [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org from the Japanese Art Open Database, sits at the intersection of commercial graphic design and the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) movement that defined Maki Haku's career. Born Maejima Tadaaki in 1924 in Ibaraki Prefecture, Maki Haku emerged in the 1950s as a self-taught printmaker who pushed the sosaku-hanga ethos of "self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed" toward a thoroughly modern, non-representational vocabulary. By the mid-1960s he had become one of the most internationally recognized practitioners of abstract kanji prints, a genre in which a single Chinese character or fragment of calligraphy is enlarged, embossed, and embedded into a textured ground of cement and pigment. The Red Lantern Shop catalog covers gave Maki Haku a regular platform to translate that signature aesthetic into a smaller, dealer-facing format, and they remain useful documents of how his style was packaged and circulated. The autumn catalog's seasonal framing also nods to the long lineage of Japanese print imagery tied to the calendar, even as Maki Haku's idiom belongs firmly to the international postwar avant-garde rather than to ukiyo-e tradition. Source: ukiyo-e.org (Japanese Art Open Database), Red Lantern Shop catalog image.