Fifty Kyogen Plays (Kyogen gojuban)

Tsukioka Gyokusei's Fifty Kyogen Plays (Kyogen gojuban) is the artist's central woodblock project and one of the most sustained twentieth-century engagements with the iconography of kyogen, the comic farce that has accompanied no in the Japanese theatrical tradition since the medieval period. Tsukioka Gyokusei (1908-1994) was the daughter and pupil of Tsukioka Kogyo (1869-1927), the Meiji-Taisho designer whose long cycle Nogaku zue (Pictures of No, 1898-1903) and the subsequent Nohga taikan and Nohga seishu had established the modern visual canon of the no stage; her own production extended that family commitment to the Japanese classical theater into the post-war decades, with a particular attention to the kyogen repertory that had been comparatively underdeveloped in her father's work. The Kyogen gojuban was issued in installments through the 1940s and 1950s, with the carving and printing entrusted to the established craftsmen of the Tsukioka studio circle, and presents fifty plays drawn from the canonical Okura and Izumi schools of the kyogen tradition. Each sheet identifies its play by a cartouche giving the title and depicts the comic protagonists in the moment of recognition or reversal that defines the dramaturgical arc of the form, with the costume, mask, and staging detail registered with the documentary precision that characterized the Tsukioka family practice. The sheets are issued in oban tate-e format with selective use of graduated color, fine textile patterning, and metallic pigment, and the production values pitch the project as a deluxe theatrical archive rather than as a popular commercial print. The series belongs alongside her father's no cycles as the central twentieth-century pictorial record of the classical Japanese theater, and impressions are catalogued among the Gyokusei holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the National Noh Theatre archive, where the project figures as one of the most accomplished mid-century engagements with the kyogen tradition.

The Fifty Kyogen Plays (Kyogen gojuban) series contains 35 prints, created by Tsukioka Gyokusei.

The Fifty Kyogen Plays (Kyogen gojuban) series was created by Tsukioka Gyokusei (月岡玉成).

We currently have 30 of 35 known prints from the Fifty Kyogen Plays (Kyogen gojuban) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.