New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties
About This Series
New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties (Shin bijin junisugata or Gendai bijin junisugata, in the alternative reading by which the title is sometimes parsed) is the second of Ito Shinsui's foundational twelve-print bijin-ga cycles for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, published across the late 1920s as a sequel to the earlier Twelve Images that had established Shinsui's manner in the late 1910s. The set carried forward the project of redefining bijin-ga for a twentieth-century audience by relocating the subject from the licensed-quarter courtesan of late Edo to the contemporary middle-class Japanese woman, drawn in moments of private domestic interiority rather than in public costume display, and rendered through the collaborative shin-hanga production system in which the artist's drawing was carried by Watanabe's separately trained block carvers and printers. By the time Shinsui designed the New Twelve, he was in his late twenties and at the height of his powers as the principal bijin-ga artist of the shin-hanga movement, his reputation established through the success of the earlier cycle and through the steady stream of single-sheet bijin prints that Watanabe had been issuing throughout the 1920s. The New Twelve accordingly shows a more confident handling of the bijin-ga subject than its predecessor, with refined facial modeling, more ambitious kimono patterns, and atmospheric backgrounds calibrated to particular times of day and seasonal observances, all carried by the Watanabe workshop's mature command of bokashi gradation and complex overprinting. The cycle belongs to a moment in which Shinsui's reputation extended well beyond Japan through Watanabe's international distribution, with the prints circulating among collectors in the United States and Europe who recognized them as the contemporary face of Japanese bijin-ga. Surviving early Watanabe impressions are valued for the fine register, full pigment work, and crisp bokashi that distinguish first-edition printings from the postwar restrikes that the firm produced after 1945, and representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, where the set is studied as one of the defining shin-hanga statements of the late 1920s and as the model for the Showa-era bijin-ga series through which Shinsui continued to define the genre.
Prints in This Series (5)
Frequently Asked Questions
New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties (Shin bijin junisugata or Gendai bijin junisugata, in the alternative reading by which the title is sometimes parsed) is the second of Ito Shinsui's foundational twelve-print bijin-ga cycles for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, published across the late 1920s as a sequel to the earlier Twelve Images that had established Shinsui's manner in the late 1910s. The set carried forward the project of redefining bijin-ga for a twentieth-century audience by relocating the subject from the licensed-quarter courtesan of late Edo to the contemporary middle-class Japanese woman, drawn in moments of private domestic interiority rather than in public costume display, and rendered through the collaborative shin-hanga production system in which the artist's drawing was carried by Watanabe's separately trained block carvers and printers. By the time Shinsui designed the New Twelve, he was in his late twenties and at the height of his powers as the principal bijin-ga artist of the shin-hanga movement, his reputation established through the success of the earlier cycle and through the steady stream of single-sheet bijin prints that Watanabe had been issuing throughout the 1920s. The New Twelve accordingly shows a more confident handling of the bijin-ga subject than its predecessor, with refined facial modeling, more ambitious kimono patterns, and atmospheric backgrounds calibrated to particular times of day and seasonal observances, all carried by the Watanabe workshop's mature command of bokashi gradation and complex overprinting. The cycle belongs to a moment in which Shinsui's reputation extended well beyond Japan through Watanabe's international distribution, with the prints circulating among collectors in the United States and Europe who recognized them as the contemporary face of Japanese bijin-ga. Surviving early Watanabe impressions are valued for the fine register, full pigment work, and crisp bokashi that distinguish first-edition printings from the postwar restrikes that the firm produced after 1945, and representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, where the set is studied as one of the defining shin-hanga statements of the late 1920s and as the model for the Showa-era bijin-ga series through which Shinsui continued to define the genre.
The New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties series contains 7 prints, created by Ito Shinsui.
The New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties series was created by Ito Shinsui (伊東深水).
We currently have 5 of 7 known prints from the New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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