1966 Autumn Catalog

1966 Autumn Catalog is a print by Tadashige Ono (1909-1990) that takes the form of a printed catalog cover or announcement, a working-life document of the kind that postwar Japanese print artists frequently produced for galleries, dealers, and exhibition organizers. The title and date locate the work in the autumn of 1966, a period when Ono was a long-established figure in the sosaku-hanga movement and an active member of the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai), the principal body through which creative-print artists exhibited and circulated their work in postwar Japan. Sosaku-hanga, the creative print movement, held that the artist should personally design, carve, and print each work, and Ono carried this discipline into commissions of every scale, treating a catalog cover with the same artisanal seriousness as an exhibition print. The reference to Red Lantern Shop in the cataloging metadata at ukiyo-e.org links the sheet to the Red Lantern Shop in Kyoto, a long-running gallery and dealership that championed sosaku-hanga prints to international visitors and produced seasonal catalogs of its inventory. Ono's contribution to such a catalog reflects the close working relationships between creative-print artists and the small network of Kyoto and Tokyo dealers who sustained the market for original Japanese prints in the 1960s. The image is documented at ukiyo-e.org, the union-search database that aggregates Japanese print records from museums and dealers worldwide, providing collectors and researchers with the standard cataloging reference for this Tadashige Ono work.