Pictures of Ginza, First Series (Gashu Ginza dai isshu)
Gashu Ginza dai isshu
About This Series
Pictures of Ginza, First Series, the Gashu Ginza dai isshu, is among the most documented of Oda Kazuma's urban cycles, an eight-print album dated 1928 that gathers his views of the Ginza district at the height of its interwar transformation into the showcase of modern Tokyo. The dai isshu designation, first series, suggests a sequence Oda may have intended to extend, although the bound album of 1928 remains the principal published set under that title. Each sheet is dated and titled with the documentary precision that characterized Oda's cityscape practice, naming the exact building, floor, and viewpoint from which the scene is recorded: the view of the rebuilt Kabukiza from Matsuya department store, of Mitsukoshi from upper-floor windows, of the Ginza streetscape from particular intersections at particular hours. The album belongs to the period when Oda was based principally in Osaka, where he had relocated around 1922 and where he was active in the Kansai print scene around the publisher Nishinomiya Yosaku, while continuing to issue Tokyo subjects for the eastern market. Trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and one of the founding members of the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai in 1918, Oda brought to the woodblock a graphic designer's habits of crisp outline, restrained palette, and architectural composition, distinct from the lyrical mode of his Watanabe Shozaburo contemporaries. The Ginza dai isshu album accordingly registers the district in a documentary register, attentive to telephone poles, steel-frame construction, the geometry of streetcar rails, and the upper-floor vantage points that had become available as department-store cafes and observation decks opened across the late 1920s. Modern scholarship treats the album as among the principal records of late-1920s Ginza to survive from the shin-hanga decade, and 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.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Pictures of Ginza, First Series, the Gashu Ginza dai isshu, is among the most documented of Oda Kazuma's urban cycles, an eight-print album dated 1928 that gathers his views of the Ginza district at the height of its interwar transformation into the showcase of modern Tokyo. The dai isshu designation, first series, suggests a sequence Oda may have intended to extend, although the bound album of 1928 remains the principal published set under that title. Each sheet is dated and titled with the documentary precision that characterized Oda's cityscape practice, naming the exact building, floor, and viewpoint from which the scene is recorded: the view of the rebuilt Kabukiza from Matsuya department store, of Mitsukoshi from upper-floor windows, of the Ginza streetscape from particular intersections at particular hours. The album belongs to the period when Oda was based principally in Osaka, where he had relocated around 1922 and where he was active in the Kansai print scene around the publisher Nishinomiya Yosaku, while continuing to issue Tokyo subjects for the eastern market. Trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and one of the founding members of the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai in 1918, Oda brought to the woodblock a graphic designer's habits of crisp outline, restrained palette, and architectural composition, distinct from the lyrical mode of his Watanabe Shozaburo contemporaries. The Ginza dai isshu album accordingly registers the district in a documentary register, attentive to telephone poles, steel-frame construction, the geometry of streetcar rails, and the upper-floor vantage points that had become available as department-store cafes and observation decks opened across the late 1920s. Modern scholarship treats the album as among the principal records of late-1920s Ginza to survive from the shin-hanga decade, and 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.
The Pictures of Ginza, First Series (Gashu Ginza dai isshu) series contains 1 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Pictures of Ginza, First Series (Gashu Ginza dai isshu) series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Pictures of Ginza, First Series (Gashu Ginza dai isshu) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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