Folk Customs of Japan (Nihon minzoku zufu)
Nihon minzoku zufu
About This Series
Nihon minzoku zufu, here rendered Folk Customs of Japan, is among the print suites in which Kawanishi Hide (1894-1965), the Kobe-based sosaku-hanga artist whose career was rooted in the port-city's mercantile and modernist culture, treated regional Japanese festival, occupation, and folk-life subjects in his characteristic broadly massed, high-key color manner. Largely self-taught as a woodblock artist after his initial training in Western-style painting and his early life as the son of a Kobe trading family, Kawanishi developed across the 1920s and 1930s a distinctive sosaku-hanga vocabulary in which figural and topographical subject is reduced to flat unmodulated planes of bold red, indigo, mustard, and emerald, the printed surface often retaining the visible wood-grain and the marks of hand-rubbed baren impression as evidence of the artist's direct touch. The Nihon minzoku zufu subjects belong to the broad national interest in minzokugaku, the discipline of folklore studies that the ethnographer Yanagita Kunio had established in the 1910s and that fed into the prewar mingei craft revival of Yanagi Soetsu, and Kawanishi treats festival processions, fishing villages, agricultural rites, and provincial dress and occupation in the same affirmative folk-art register that distinguishes his other regional series including his celebrated Hyakkei of Kobe. The series belongs to the prewar consolidation of his career, the years before his establishment as the principal Kobe sosaku-hanga artist and his postwar election to the Japan Print Association, and impressions are documented in the Kobe City Museum, which preserves the principal Kawanishi holdings, in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, and in the American collections of twentieth-century Japanese print at the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art New York.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Nihon minzoku zufu, here rendered Folk Customs of Japan, is among the print suites in which Kawanishi Hide (1894-1965), the Kobe-based sosaku-hanga artist whose career was rooted in the port-city's mercantile and modernist culture, treated regional Japanese festival, occupation, and folk-life subjects in his characteristic broadly massed, high-key color manner. Largely self-taught as a woodblock artist after his initial training in Western-style painting and his early life as the son of a Kobe trading family, Kawanishi developed across the 1920s and 1930s a distinctive sosaku-hanga vocabulary in which figural and topographical subject is reduced to flat unmodulated planes of bold red, indigo, mustard, and emerald, the printed surface often retaining the visible wood-grain and the marks of hand-rubbed baren impression as evidence of the artist's direct touch. The Nihon minzoku zufu subjects belong to the broad national interest in minzokugaku, the discipline of folklore studies that the ethnographer Yanagita Kunio had established in the 1910s and that fed into the prewar mingei craft revival of Yanagi Soetsu, and Kawanishi treats festival processions, fishing villages, agricultural rites, and provincial dress and occupation in the same affirmative folk-art register that distinguishes his other regional series including his celebrated Hyakkei of Kobe. The series belongs to the prewar consolidation of his career, the years before his establishment as the principal Kobe sosaku-hanga artist and his postwar election to the Japan Print Association, and impressions are documented in the Kobe City Museum, which preserves the principal Kawanishi holdings, in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, and in the American collections of twentieth-century Japanese print at the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art New York.
The Folk Customs of Japan (Nihon minzoku zufu) series contains 1 prints, created by Hide Kawanishi.
The Folk Customs of Japan (Nihon minzoku zufu) series was created by Hide Kawanishi (川西英).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Folk Customs of Japan (Nihon minzoku zufu) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Folk Customs of Japan (Nihon minzoku zufu)?
Sign up to start rating