Scenery of Niigata (Gashu Niigata fukei)
Gashu Niigata fukei
About This Series
Scenery of Niigata, known in Japanese as Gashu Niigata fukei, belongs to the regional cityscape projects through which Oda Kazuma extended his urban observational practice beyond the Tokyo and Osaka subjects for which he was best known. Niigata, the principal port of the Japan Sea coast and the largest city of the snow country, offered Oda a subject distinct in atmosphere from the metropolitan centers: a provincial harbor town shaped by the long winter, the river-and-canal geography of the Shinano delta, and the particular vernacular architecture of the snow regions. The series likely dates to the late 1920s or early 1930s, during the period in which Oda was based in Osaka but traveling for regional subjects, and like his other gashu (picture-album) projects it was conceived as a bound set of plates rather than as loose commercial sheets, the format more typical of sosaku-hanga publication than of the Watanabe shin-hanga model. Oda's lithographer's eye, sharpened by his training at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and by his work for the early-Showa graphic press, registers Niigata in the documentary mode characteristic of his cityscape practice, with rooflines, bridges, canals, and harbor frontages treated as architectural problems of silhouette and weather rather than as the picturesque snow-country scenes that contemporaries like Kawase Hasui had produced for the Watanabe Shozaburo workshop. The series belongs to the broader interwar interest in regional cities as subjects worthy of serial pictorial treatment, an interest that produced Hasui's various provincial sets, Yoshida Hiroshi's mountain and inland-sea cycles, and Onchi Koshiro's coastal observations, but Oda's Niigata work distinguishes itself by its sober graphic restraint and its refusal of the seasonal sentiment that characterized contemporary shin-hanga snow imagery. Impressions are documented in the holdings of the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, where Oda's regional subjects are preserved among the museum's substantial collection of early-Showa Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Scenery of Niigata, known in Japanese as Gashu Niigata fukei, belongs to the regional cityscape projects through which Oda Kazuma extended his urban observational practice beyond the Tokyo and Osaka subjects for which he was best known. Niigata, the principal port of the Japan Sea coast and the largest city of the snow country, offered Oda a subject distinct in atmosphere from the metropolitan centers: a provincial harbor town shaped by the long winter, the river-and-canal geography of the Shinano delta, and the particular vernacular architecture of the snow regions. The series likely dates to the late 1920s or early 1930s, during the period in which Oda was based in Osaka but traveling for regional subjects, and like his other gashu (picture-album) projects it was conceived as a bound set of plates rather than as loose commercial sheets, the format more typical of sosaku-hanga publication than of the Watanabe shin-hanga model. Oda's lithographer's eye, sharpened by his training at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and by his work for the early-Showa graphic press, registers Niigata in the documentary mode characteristic of his cityscape practice, with rooflines, bridges, canals, and harbor frontages treated as architectural problems of silhouette and weather rather than as the picturesque snow-country scenes that contemporaries like Kawase Hasui had produced for the Watanabe Shozaburo workshop. The series belongs to the broader interwar interest in regional cities as subjects worthy of serial pictorial treatment, an interest that produced Hasui's various provincial sets, Yoshida Hiroshi's mountain and inland-sea cycles, and Onchi Koshiro's coastal observations, but Oda's Niigata work distinguishes itself by its sober graphic restraint and its refusal of the seasonal sentiment that characterized contemporary shin-hanga snow imagery. Impressions are documented in the holdings of the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, where Oda's regional subjects are preserved among the museum's substantial collection of early-Showa Japanese print.
The Scenery of Niigata (Gashu Niigata fukei) series contains 1 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Scenery of Niigata (Gashu Niigata fukei) series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Scenery of Niigata (Gashu Niigata fukei) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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