Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga)
Shinjuku Gyoen hanga
About This Series
Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) is the small cycle of Tokyo park subjects through which Kitaoka Fumio addressed the Shinjuku Gyoen, the large public garden in central Tokyo that had been established in the late nineteenth century as an imperial property and that had become after its postwar transfer to public administration in 1949 one of the principal urban green spaces of the modern capital. The garden, comprising approximately fifty-eight hectares of mixed Japanese, English, and French landscape design spread across the boundary of Shinjuku and Shibuya wards, supplied Kitaoka with a subject that combined the inherited Japanese garden tradition of pond, rock, and cultivated plant with the European-influenced landscape elements of the imperial Meiji and Taisho redesigns, and the resulting prints address a particularly hybrid postwar Tokyo subject. Kitaoka Fumio, born in 1918 in Tokyo and trained in oil painting and printmaking at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before the wartime mobilization, was a Tokyo resident across most of his career and brought to the Shinjuku Gyoen cycle the personal observation of a local user of the garden as well as the trained eye of a sosaku-hanga landscape artist. The sosaku-hanga production method, in which the artist personally cut his own blocks and supervised or executed his own printing in opposition to the collaborative division of labor of the inherited workshop tradition, gave Kitaoka's Shinjuku Gyoen prints an authorial directness in which the cutting marks of the gouge and the exposed grain of the wood block supplied part of the expressive vocabulary, and the cycle accordingly belongs to the body of his postwar Tokyo work through which he addressed the modern capital in his characteristic sosaku-hanga vocabulary. Within Kitaoka's career the Shinjuku Gyoen cycle belongs alongside his Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) project, his foreign travel series, and his other landscape strands as a distinctive small project addressed to a particular Tokyo subject, and modern scholarship treats his Tokyo prints as evidence of the sosaku-hanga movement's continuing engagement with metropolitan subjects in the postwar decades. The cycle stands within the broader context of the postwar sosaku-hanga tradition that Onchi Koshiro, Hiratsuka Unichi, and Maekawa Senpan had established and that Saito Kiyoshi had carried into international recognition through the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennale, and Kitaoka's Shinjuku Gyoen prints supply evidence of the regional and metropolitan specificity that the postwar sosaku-hanga artists frequently brought to their immediate environment. Representative impressions are held by major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Frequently Asked Questions
Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) is the small cycle of Tokyo park subjects through which Kitaoka Fumio addressed the Shinjuku Gyoen, the large public garden in central Tokyo that had been established in the late nineteenth century as an imperial property and that had become after its postwar transfer to public administration in 1949 one of the principal urban green spaces of the modern capital. The garden, comprising approximately fifty-eight hectares of mixed Japanese, English, and French landscape design spread across the boundary of Shinjuku and Shibuya wards, supplied Kitaoka with a subject that combined the inherited Japanese garden tradition of pond, rock, and cultivated plant with the European-influenced landscape elements of the imperial Meiji and Taisho redesigns, and the resulting prints address a particularly hybrid postwar Tokyo subject. Kitaoka Fumio, born in 1918 in Tokyo and trained in oil painting and printmaking at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before the wartime mobilization, was a Tokyo resident across most of his career and brought to the Shinjuku Gyoen cycle the personal observation of a local user of the garden as well as the trained eye of a sosaku-hanga landscape artist. The sosaku-hanga production method, in which the artist personally cut his own blocks and supervised or executed his own printing in opposition to the collaborative division of labor of the inherited workshop tradition, gave Kitaoka's Shinjuku Gyoen prints an authorial directness in which the cutting marks of the gouge and the exposed grain of the wood block supplied part of the expressive vocabulary, and the cycle accordingly belongs to the body of his postwar Tokyo work through which he addressed the modern capital in his characteristic sosaku-hanga vocabulary. Within Kitaoka's career the Shinjuku Gyoen cycle belongs alongside his Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) project, his foreign travel series, and his other landscape strands as a distinctive small project addressed to a particular Tokyo subject, and modern scholarship treats his Tokyo prints as evidence of the sosaku-hanga movement's continuing engagement with metropolitan subjects in the postwar decades. The cycle stands within the broader context of the postwar sosaku-hanga tradition that Onchi Koshiro, Hiratsuka Unichi, and Maekawa Senpan had established and that Saito Kiyoshi had carried into international recognition through the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennale, and Kitaoka's Shinjuku Gyoen prints supply evidence of the regional and metropolitan specificity that the postwar sosaku-hanga artists frequently brought to their immediate environment. Representative impressions are held by major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) series contains 1 prints, created by Fumio Kitaoka.
The Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) series was created by Fumio Kitaoka (北岡文雄).
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