Modern Styles of Makeup

Modern Styles of Makeup (Kindai jiseisho, by the standard reading of the Japanese title) is the principal bijin-ga cycle of Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, designed for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo across the late 1920s and early 1930s and standing as the central shin-hanga treatment of the moga or modern girl subject through which the artist established his distinctive position within the Watanabe figural program. The cycle gathers a sequence of contemporary Japanese women in moments of cosmetic application and self-presentation, each treated as a single figure against a plain or atmospheric ground in the okubi-e or half-length convention, and each registered through the bobbed hair, Western or Western-influenced dress, and saturated cosmetic vocabulary that defined the moga visual register of the late Taisho and early Showa decades. The makeup subject, with its association with the urban entertainment quarters of Ginza and Asakusa and with the Western-style cafe waitress, dance-hall partner, and cosmetic-counter saleswoman of interwar Tokyo, supplied Kobayakawa with a contemporary subject sharply distinct from the more traditionally costumed bijin-ga that Ito Shinsui and the other Watanabe figural artists were producing in parallel, and the cycle accordingly stands as the most committed twentieth-century shin-hanga engagement with Japanese urban modernity in its female form. Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, born in 1899 in Fukuoka and trained in Nihonga under the Kaburaki Kiyokata school before his entry into the shin-hanga program, brought to the cycle a draftsmanship that combined the linear refinement of the Kiyokata bijin-ga lineage with a sharp graphic sensibility addressed to the moga subject's distinctive visual codes, producing prints whose pictorial accomplishment matched their contemporary subject matter. The collaborative shin-hanga production method, in which Watanabe's separately trained block carvers and printers carried through the artist's drawing under the publisher's coordinating direction, allowed the cycle to achieve the saturated cosmetic effects, complex pattern work, and atmospheric ground that the moga subject demanded, and the prints stand as one of the technical accomplishments of the Watanabe program of the late 1920s. Within Kobayakawa's career, which was cut short by his death in 1948 at the age of forty-nine, the cycle stands as his most important project and as the work through which he established his reputation as the principal moga bijin-ga artist of the shin-hanga movement, and modern scholarship treats it as the central documentation of the shin-hanga engagement with Japanese modernity in its female form. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, where the cycle is valued both for its pictorial accomplishment and as a record of interwar Japanese urban modernity.

The Modern Styles of Makeup series contains 1 prints, created by Kobayakawa Kiyoshi.

The Modern Styles of Makeup series was created by Kobayakawa Kiyoshi (小早川清).

We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Modern Styles of Makeup series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.