Pictures of Ginza
About This Series
Pictures of Ginza is the convenient English designation under which several related cityscape projects by Oda Kazuma (1882-1956) circulated, all centered on the Ginza district that was, through the late Taisho and early Showa years, the principal stage on which Tokyo presented itself as a modern metropolis. Oda's Ginza work, of which the best-attested cycle is the Gashu Ginza dai isshu (Pictures of Ginza, First Series) issued in 1928, belongs to the broader interwar interest in townscape that emerged across both the shin-hanga workshops and the sosaku-hanga circles. Oda's position was unusual within that landscape: trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and one of the founding members of the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai in 1918, he brought to the woodblock a graphic designer's habits of crisp outline, restrained palette, and architectural composition, distinct from the lyrical atmospherics of his Watanabe Shozaburo contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi. The Ginza views accordingly favor an observational rather than picturesque register, framing the district from upper-floor vantage points across the Matsuya and Mitsukoshi department stores, registering the geometry of telephone poles, steel-frame construction, and electric signage that had begun to crowd the foreground of the modern city, and treating familiar landmarks such as the rebuilt Kabukiza as documentary anchors rather than nostalgic icons. The Ginza project belongs to the period during which Oda was based principally in Osaka, where he had relocated around 1922 and where he was active in the Osaka publishing circle around Nishinomiya Yosaku, while continuing to issue Tokyo subjects for the eastern market. Modern scholarship reads the Pictures of Ginza material as among the most documentary records of late-1920s Tokyo to come out of the shin-hanga decade, and impressions are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds an unusually full run of Oda's urban series, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, whose Oda holdings document the artist's career on both sides of the Tokyo-Osaka axis.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Pictures of Ginza is the convenient English designation under which several related cityscape projects by Oda Kazuma (1882-1956) circulated, all centered on the Ginza district that was, through the late Taisho and early Showa years, the principal stage on which Tokyo presented itself as a modern metropolis. Oda's Ginza work, of which the best-attested cycle is the Gashu Ginza dai isshu (Pictures of Ginza, First Series) issued in 1928, belongs to the broader interwar interest in townscape that emerged across both the shin-hanga workshops and the sosaku-hanga circles. Oda's position was unusual within that landscape: trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and one of the founding members of the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai in 1918, he brought to the woodblock a graphic designer's habits of crisp outline, restrained palette, and architectural composition, distinct from the lyrical atmospherics of his Watanabe Shozaburo contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi. The Ginza views accordingly favor an observational rather than picturesque register, framing the district from upper-floor vantage points across the Matsuya and Mitsukoshi department stores, registering the geometry of telephone poles, steel-frame construction, and electric signage that had begun to crowd the foreground of the modern city, and treating familiar landmarks such as the rebuilt Kabukiza as documentary anchors rather than nostalgic icons. The Ginza project belongs to the period during which Oda was based principally in Osaka, where he had relocated around 1922 and where he was active in the Osaka publishing circle around Nishinomiya Yosaku, while continuing to issue Tokyo subjects for the eastern market. Modern scholarship reads the Pictures of Ginza material as among the most documentary records of late-1920s Tokyo to come out of the shin-hanga decade, and impressions are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds an unusually full run of Oda's urban series, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, whose Oda holdings document the artist's career on both sides of the Tokyo-Osaka axis.
The Pictures of Ginza series contains 5 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Pictures of Ginza series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
We currently have 2 of 5 known prints from the Pictures of Ginza series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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