Scenery of Shinjuku
About This Series
Scenery of Shinjuku, the Gashu Shinjuku fukei, is one of Oda Kazuma's most coherently conceived urban cycles, gathering his observational treatments of the Shinjuku district at the precise moment of its transformation from a sleepy western post-station on the old Koshu Kaido into the modern leisure and entertainment quarter that it remains. The series dates principally to 1930 and is opened by the Distant View of Mitsukoshi Movie Theater in Shinjuku from the Sixth Floor of Hoteiya, a print whose unwieldy documentary title is characteristic of Oda's approach: an exact specification of the building, floor, and viewpoint from which the scene is recorded. Each sheet in the cycle accordingly registers Shinjuku from a specific architectural vantage point, looking across rooftops toward the cinemas, department stores, and entertainment venues that had begun to crowd the district in the late 1920s. The Shinjuku project participates in the broader interwar interest in the new entertainment districts that had risen in the western suburbs of Tokyo, of which Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Asakusa were the principal examples, and whose transformation from semi-rural transit nodes into electric, cinema-lit modern quarters offered the urban printmaker a subject distinct from the older meisho centers of central Edo. Oda, who had trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and who brought to the woodblock the graphic designer's habits of architectural composition and restrained palette, treated Shinjuku in the documentary register characteristic of his cityscape practice, attentive to power lines stretching across the foreground, low rooftops giving way to taller commercial blocks, and the cinema facades that served as beacons of the new urban culture. The series belongs to Oda's Osaka period, the years from approximately 1922 to 1936 during which he was based principally in the Kansai but continued to issue Tokyo subjects for the eastern market. 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.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Scenery of Shinjuku, the Gashu Shinjuku fukei, is one of Oda Kazuma's most coherently conceived urban cycles, gathering his observational treatments of the Shinjuku district at the precise moment of its transformation from a sleepy western post-station on the old Koshu Kaido into the modern leisure and entertainment quarter that it remains. The series dates principally to 1930 and is opened by the Distant View of Mitsukoshi Movie Theater in Shinjuku from the Sixth Floor of Hoteiya, a print whose unwieldy documentary title is characteristic of Oda's approach: an exact specification of the building, floor, and viewpoint from which the scene is recorded. Each sheet in the cycle accordingly registers Shinjuku from a specific architectural vantage point, looking across rooftops toward the cinemas, department stores, and entertainment venues that had begun to crowd the district in the late 1920s. The Shinjuku project participates in the broader interwar interest in the new entertainment districts that had risen in the western suburbs of Tokyo, of which Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Asakusa were the principal examples, and whose transformation from semi-rural transit nodes into electric, cinema-lit modern quarters offered the urban printmaker a subject distinct from the older meisho centers of central Edo. Oda, who had trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and who brought to the woodblock the graphic designer's habits of architectural composition and restrained palette, treated Shinjuku in the documentary register characteristic of his cityscape practice, attentive to power lines stretching across the foreground, low rooftops giving way to taller commercial blocks, and the cinema facades that served as beacons of the new urban culture. The series belongs to Oda's Osaka period, the years from approximately 1922 to 1936 during which he was based principally in the Kansai but continued to issue Tokyo subjects for the eastern market. 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.
The Scenery of Shinjuku series contains 1 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Scenery of Shinjuku series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Scenery of Shinjuku series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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