Morigasaki Coast

Morigasaki Coast departs from the bijin-ga interiors with which Torii Kotondo is most closely identified and engages the landscape branch of the shin-hanga movement. Kotondo, the seventh-generation head of the Torii school of kabuki signboard painters and one of the most celebrated bijin-ga designers of the twentieth century, occasionally turned his hand to the seasonal and topographical motifs that occupied his peers Kawase Hasui and Tsuchiya Koitsu. Morigasaki, on the western shore of Tokyo Bay south of Tokyo, was a stretch of fishing village coastline that shin-hanga designers prized for its low horizon, working boats, and softly modulated skies — the kind of subject that allowed publishers and carvers to demonstrate the medium's capacity for atmospheric gradation. Indexed through ukiyo-e.org from the Viewing Japanese Prints database, the design uses bokashi printing to wash the sky and water with overlapping bands of color, the carved line reserved for the masts, rooftops, and figures that anchor the composition. While Kotondo's name is more frequently associated with the intimate bijin-ga interiors he produced for publishers Sakai and Ikeda, designs such as Morigasaki Coast remind viewers that the Torii school's hereditary draftsmanship could also serve the open-air, landscape-driven side of shin-hanga, and that early Showa printmaking was a more interconnected ecosystem of designers, publishers, and craftsmen than the standard categorization of "bijin-ga" versus "landscape" artists tends to suggest.