Eight Views of Sapporo (Sapporo hakkei)
Sapporo hakkei
About This Series
Eight Views of Sapporo (Sapporo hakkei) is the Hokkaido landscape cycle of Maeda Masao, the sosaku-hanga artist who applied the inherited Chinese eight-view format to the principal city of Japan's northern island, producing one of the relatively few sustained twentieth-century treatments of Sapporo in the woodblock medium. The hakkei or eight-view tradition, descended from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting around Lake Biwa and other classical sites, had been adapted across the centuries to a wide range of regional and urban subjects, and twentieth-century sosaku-hanga artists frequently used the format as a structural device through which to organize cycles of contemporary local landscape. Maeda Masao, born in 1904 in Hakodate on the southern tip of Hokkaido and trained in printmaking through his association with the Japanese Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai), the principal organization of the sosaku-hanga movement founded in 1931, brought to the Sapporo cycle the personal regional knowledge of a Hokkaido native and the artist-cut, artist-printed sosaku-hanga method that distinguished his generation from the publisher-led shin-hanga of the Watanabe program. The sosaku-hanga production method, in which the artist personally cut his own blocks and supervised or executed his own printing in opposition to the collaborative division of labor that defined the inherited ukiyo-e and contemporary shin-hanga workshops, was the central doctrinal commitment of the Japanese Print Association and gave Maeda's Sapporo prints an authorial directness distinct from the comparable shin-hanga landscapes of Hasui and Yoshida. The cycle accordingly stands as evidence of how the sosaku-hanga movement could address regional landscape subjects through its self-cut method, and its treatment of Sapporo, a city of mixed Meiji-era European and Japanese urban fabric that had grown rapidly through the late nineteenth century as the administrative center of the colonial frontier in Hokkaido, supplied Maeda with a distinctive modern subject that the older meisho-e tradition had not extensively addressed. Within Maeda's career the Sapporo cycle belongs to the regional landscape work through which he developed his sosaku-hanga manner across the prewar and early postwar decades, and modern scholarship treats it as a representative example of the regional address that sosaku-hanga artists frequently brought to the subjects of their home areas. Representative impressions are held by major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they document the regional landscape tradition of the sosaku-hanga movement.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight Views of Sapporo (Sapporo hakkei) is the Hokkaido landscape cycle of Maeda Masao, the sosaku-hanga artist who applied the inherited Chinese eight-view format to the principal city of Japan's northern island, producing one of the relatively few sustained twentieth-century treatments of Sapporo in the woodblock medium. The hakkei or eight-view tradition, descended from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting around Lake Biwa and other classical sites, had been adapted across the centuries to a wide range of regional and urban subjects, and twentieth-century sosaku-hanga artists frequently used the format as a structural device through which to organize cycles of contemporary local landscape. Maeda Masao, born in 1904 in Hakodate on the southern tip of Hokkaido and trained in printmaking through his association with the Japanese Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai), the principal organization of the sosaku-hanga movement founded in 1931, brought to the Sapporo cycle the personal regional knowledge of a Hokkaido native and the artist-cut, artist-printed sosaku-hanga method that distinguished his generation from the publisher-led shin-hanga of the Watanabe program. The sosaku-hanga production method, in which the artist personally cut his own blocks and supervised or executed his own printing in opposition to the collaborative division of labor that defined the inherited ukiyo-e and contemporary shin-hanga workshops, was the central doctrinal commitment of the Japanese Print Association and gave Maeda's Sapporo prints an authorial directness distinct from the comparable shin-hanga landscapes of Hasui and Yoshida. The cycle accordingly stands as evidence of how the sosaku-hanga movement could address regional landscape subjects through its self-cut method, and its treatment of Sapporo, a city of mixed Meiji-era European and Japanese urban fabric that had grown rapidly through the late nineteenth century as the administrative center of the colonial frontier in Hokkaido, supplied Maeda with a distinctive modern subject that the older meisho-e tradition had not extensively addressed. Within Maeda's career the Sapporo cycle belongs to the regional landscape work through which he developed his sosaku-hanga manner across the prewar and early postwar decades, and modern scholarship treats it as a representative example of the regional address that sosaku-hanga artists frequently brought to the subjects of their home areas. Representative impressions are held by major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they document the regional landscape tradition of the sosaku-hanga movement.
The Eight Views of Sapporo (Sapporo hakkei) series contains 1 prints, created by Maeda Masao.
The Eight Views of Sapporo (Sapporo hakkei) series was created by Maeda Masao (前田政雄).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Eight Views of Sapporo (Sapporo hakkei) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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