Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro and the Ichimoku-kai print society in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists revisited the topography of the imperial capital in a sequence of single-sheet compositions, each contributor producing one or more views of remembered Tokyo neighborhoods, monuments, and street scenes. Maekawa Senpan (1888-1960), a senior sosaku-hanga figure who had begun his print career in the early 1910s under the Hosun magazine circle around Yamamoto Kanae and Ishii Hakutei and would by the postwar period emerge as one of the movement's principal humorist and folk-life printmakers, contributed multiple sheets to the project in his characteristic register of warm-hearted observation. Maekawa, originally a cartoonist for the satirical magazine Tokyo Puck and a self-taught woodblock artist whose later career was devoted to onsen-mura hot-spring villages, rural occupations, and the comic dignity of everyday people, brought to the Tokyo kaiko zue the affectionate eye for ordinary urban scenes that distinguishes his contributions from the more austere modernism of Onchi. The recollective title acknowledges the wartime destruction that was already overtaking the city's fabric, and the album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers in the artisanal self-carved, self-printed manner that distinguished Ichimoku-kai projects from the carver-printer collaborations of shin-hanga. Maekawa was also a principal contributor to the prewar Shin Tokyo hyakkei of 1928 to 1932, and his association with Onchi spanned the full arc of the sosaku-hanga movement from its prewar consolidation to its postwar international visibility. Impressions of the Tokyo kaiko zue including Maekawa's contributions are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro and the Ichimoku-kai print society in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists revisited the topography of the imperial capital in a sequence of single-sheet compositions, each contributor producing one or more views of remembered Tokyo neighborhoods, monuments, and street scenes. Maekawa Senpan (1888-1960), a senior sosaku-hanga figure who had begun his print career in the early 1910s under the Hosun magazine circle around Yamamoto Kanae and Ishii Hakutei and would by the postwar period emerge as one of the movement's principal humorist and folk-life printmakers, contributed multiple sheets to the project in his characteristic register of warm-hearted observation. Maekawa, originally a cartoonist for the satirical magazine Tokyo Puck and a self-taught woodblock artist whose later career was devoted to onsen-mura hot-spring villages, rural occupations, and the comic dignity of everyday people, brought to the Tokyo kaiko zue the affectionate eye for ordinary urban scenes that distinguishes his contributions from the more austere modernism of Onchi. The recollective title acknowledges the wartime destruction that was already overtaking the city's fabric, and the album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers in the artisanal self-carved, self-printed manner that distinguished Ichimoku-kai projects from the carver-printer collaborations of shin-hanga. Maekawa was also a principal contributor to the prewar Shin Tokyo hyakkei of 1928 to 1932, and his association with Onchi spanned the full arc of the sosaku-hanga movement from its prewar consolidation to its postwar international visibility. Impressions of the Tokyo kaiko zue including Maekawa's contributions are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 2 prints, created by Maekawa Senpan.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Maekawa Senpan (前川千帆).
We currently have 2 of 2 known prints from the Recollections of Tokyo series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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