Views of Tokyo (Tokyo fukei)
Tokyo fukei
About This Series
Views of Tokyo, rendered in Japanese as Tokyo fukei, is one of Oda Kazuma's principal Tokyo cityscape projects, gathering his observational treatments of the capital in a series whose general title parallels the meisho-e formats of nineteenth-century Edo landscape while announcing the subject's distinctly twentieth-century identity as Tokyo, the modern administrative city. Oda's Tokyo work spans his early Watanabe Shozaburo association of the late 1910s through his Osaka period of the 1920s and 1930s and into the later years, when he had returned to Tokyo and was working more independently as a printmaker and graphic designer. The Tokyo fukei title designates a body of sheets rather than a single fixed canonical set; like the various Toto meisho cycles of Hiroshige a century earlier, the format invited Oda to organize the city into a serial roster of districts, bridges, riverfronts, and modern landmarks that subscribers could collect according to interest. Working in the manner he had developed at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko under lithographic training, Oda treated Tokyo as a graphic problem of architectural silhouette, crisp outline, and restrained palette, distinct from the atmospheric mode of his Watanabe contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi. The series captures the city during the interwar decades of greatest transformation: the rebuilding after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the rise of steel-frame and reinforced-concrete construction in Ginza, Nihonbashi, and Marunouchi, the spread of department stores, cinemas, and electric advertising, and the persistence of older residential districts in the shitamachi neighborhoods east of the Sumida. Oda's vision is documentary rather than nostalgic, and modern scholarship treats the Tokyo fukei material as among the most clear-eyed records of the early-Showa metropolis. 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 (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Views of Tokyo, rendered in Japanese as Tokyo fukei, is one of Oda Kazuma's principal Tokyo cityscape projects, gathering his observational treatments of the capital in a series whose general title parallels the meisho-e formats of nineteenth-century Edo landscape while announcing the subject's distinctly twentieth-century identity as Tokyo, the modern administrative city. Oda's Tokyo work spans his early Watanabe Shozaburo association of the late 1910s through his Osaka period of the 1920s and 1930s and into the later years, when he had returned to Tokyo and was working more independently as a printmaker and graphic designer. The Tokyo fukei title designates a body of sheets rather than a single fixed canonical set; like the various Toto meisho cycles of Hiroshige a century earlier, the format invited Oda to organize the city into a serial roster of districts, bridges, riverfronts, and modern landmarks that subscribers could collect according to interest. Working in the manner he had developed at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko under lithographic training, Oda treated Tokyo as a graphic problem of architectural silhouette, crisp outline, and restrained palette, distinct from the atmospheric mode of his Watanabe contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi. The series captures the city during the interwar decades of greatest transformation: the rebuilding after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the rise of steel-frame and reinforced-concrete construction in Ginza, Nihonbashi, and Marunouchi, the spread of department stores, cinemas, and electric advertising, and the persistence of older residential districts in the shitamachi neighborhoods east of the Sumida. Oda's vision is documentary rather than nostalgic, and modern scholarship treats the Tokyo fukei material as among the most clear-eyed records of the early-Showa metropolis. 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 Views of Tokyo (Tokyo fukei) series contains 1 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Views of Tokyo (Tokyo fukei) series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Views of Tokyo (Tokyo fukei) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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