Picture Album of the Famous Mountains of Japan (Nihon meisan gafu)
Nihon meisan gafu
About This Series
Picture Album of the Famous Mountains of Japan, the Nihon meisan gafu, is Oda Kazuma's most extended engagement with the traditional meisho-e subject of the famous mountain, recast in the artist's twentieth-century landscape idiom. Dated principally to 1937, the album gathers a canonical roster of Japanese peaks (Mount Tsukuba, Mount Asama, Mount Bandai, Mount Aso, and others identified across Japanese poetic and topographical tradition as meizan, famous mountains) and treats each in a single sustained mood of weather and season. The format adapts the nineteenth-century meisho-zukushi tradition that had organized landscape printmaking since Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Fuji and Hiroshige's various meisho cycles, but Oda translates the inherited convention into the perceptual habits of late shin-hanga and early sosaku-hanga practice, with broad tonal washes achieved through careful bokashi gradation, a quiet emptiness in place of narrative incident, and a graphic-design sensibility owed to his training as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko. By 1937 the Japanese woodblock industry was contracting under wartime pressures, and the Nihon meisan gafu represents a late flowering of the shin-hanga landscape vision before the Pacific War constrained both publication and travel. The album belongs to Oda's mature period, after his return from Osaka to Tokyo and during the years when his independent practice had moved away from sustained workshop publication toward the bound-album format more typical of sosaku-hanga. Oda's treatment of each mountain favors silhouette and atmospheric envelope over topographical incident, the peaks reduced to graphic forms set against modulated skies in the manner of a graphic designer working with the conventions of meisho-e. Impressions are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, where the album stands as a culminating example of the artist's landscape practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Picture Album of the Famous Mountains of Japan, the Nihon meisan gafu, is Oda Kazuma's most extended engagement with the traditional meisho-e subject of the famous mountain, recast in the artist's twentieth-century landscape idiom. Dated principally to 1937, the album gathers a canonical roster of Japanese peaks (Mount Tsukuba, Mount Asama, Mount Bandai, Mount Aso, and others identified across Japanese poetic and topographical tradition as meizan, famous mountains) and treats each in a single sustained mood of weather and season. The format adapts the nineteenth-century meisho-zukushi tradition that had organized landscape printmaking since Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Fuji and Hiroshige's various meisho cycles, but Oda translates the inherited convention into the perceptual habits of late shin-hanga and early sosaku-hanga practice, with broad tonal washes achieved through careful bokashi gradation, a quiet emptiness in place of narrative incident, and a graphic-design sensibility owed to his training as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko. By 1937 the Japanese woodblock industry was contracting under wartime pressures, and the Nihon meisan gafu represents a late flowering of the shin-hanga landscape vision before the Pacific War constrained both publication and travel. The album belongs to Oda's mature period, after his return from Osaka to Tokyo and during the years when his independent practice had moved away from sustained workshop publication toward the bound-album format more typical of sosaku-hanga. Oda's treatment of each mountain favors silhouette and atmospheric envelope over topographical incident, the peaks reduced to graphic forms set against modulated skies in the manner of a graphic designer working with the conventions of meisho-e. Impressions are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, where the album stands as a culminating example of the artist's landscape practice.
The Picture Album of the Famous Mountains of Japan (Nihon meisan gafu) series contains 1 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Picture Album of the Famous Mountains of Japan (Nihon meisan gafu) series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
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