Farewell and wish 4, from Tsukuhae VII

Tsukuhae ("Moonglow" or "Moon Rays") was the small sosaku-hanga and poetry magazine Onchi published with Tanaka Kyokichi and Fujimori Shizuo between 1914 and 1915, a foundational document of the creative-prints movement. The seventh and final issue, released after Tanaka's early death in 1915, functioned in part as a memorial. The "Farewell and wish" prints in that issue elegize Tanaka through a restrained visual language - simplified forms, a limited palette, and the irregularities of hand-printing accepted as expressive. As one of a numbered set of small black-and-color woodblocks bound with poetry, the work sits at the origin point of Onchi's career-long fusion of literary and pictorial sensibilities. The Tsukuhae project helped establish the artist-poet-printmaker as a recognizable figure in early-twentieth-century Japanese art and prefigured the abstract direction Onchi would take in later decades.