Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Recollections of Tokyo is the English designation for one of Maeda Masao's metropolitan cycles, a body of Tokyo prints through which the sosaku-hanga artist addressed the capital across his prewar and postwar career, drawing on the memory and observation of a city that had been transformed twice within his working lifetime by the catastrophic destruction of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the subsequent reconstruction, and again by the wartime bombing of 1944 and 1945 and the postwar rebuilding. The cycle belongs to the body of sosaku-hanga Tokyo iconography through which artists of the Japanese Print Association responded to the metropolitan transformations of the early twentieth century, complementing the parallel shin-hanga Tokyo cycles of Hasui, Koitsu, and other Watanabe artists and the earlier Twelve Views of Tokyo (Tokyo junikei) of Ishii Hakutei, and supplying a distinctive sosaku-hanga inflection through the artist-cut, artist-printed production method that the Japanese Print Association had established as its defining doctrinal commitment. Maeda Masao, born in 1904 in Hakodate, Hokkaido, and trained in printmaking through his association with the Japanese Print Association founded in 1931, brought to the Tokyo subjects the personal observation of a Tokyo resident across the decades of the city's most dramatic transformations, and the recollections format positioned the cycle as a deliberate exercise in memory rather than as a documentary record of the city as it stood at any particular moment. 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 of the inherited ukiyo-e and contemporary shin-hanga workshops, gave Maeda's Tokyo prints an authorial directness distinct from the comparable shin-hanga work of the Watanabe program, with the cutting marks of the artist's own gouge supplying part of the expressive vocabulary of the design. Within Maeda's career the Tokyo cycle belongs alongside his Hokkaido and Sapporo subjects as a principal strand of his regional and metropolitan landscape work, and modern scholarship treats the project as evidence of the sosaku-hanga movement's engagement with urban subjects across the twentieth century. 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 sosaku-hanga metropolitan tradition.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Recollections of Tokyo is the English designation for one of Maeda Masao's metropolitan cycles, a body of Tokyo prints through which the sosaku-hanga artist addressed the capital across his prewar and postwar career, drawing on the memory and observation of a city that had been transformed twice within his working lifetime by the catastrophic destruction of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the subsequent reconstruction, and again by the wartime bombing of 1944 and 1945 and the postwar rebuilding. The cycle belongs to the body of sosaku-hanga Tokyo iconography through which artists of the Japanese Print Association responded to the metropolitan transformations of the early twentieth century, complementing the parallel shin-hanga Tokyo cycles of Hasui, Koitsu, and other Watanabe artists and the earlier Twelve Views of Tokyo (Tokyo junikei) of Ishii Hakutei, and supplying a distinctive sosaku-hanga inflection through the artist-cut, artist-printed production method that the Japanese Print Association had established as its defining doctrinal commitment. Maeda Masao, born in 1904 in Hakodate, Hokkaido, and trained in printmaking through his association with the Japanese Print Association founded in 1931, brought to the Tokyo subjects the personal observation of a Tokyo resident across the decades of the city's most dramatic transformations, and the recollections format positioned the cycle as a deliberate exercise in memory rather than as a documentary record of the city as it stood at any particular moment. 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 of the inherited ukiyo-e and contemporary shin-hanga workshops, gave Maeda's Tokyo prints an authorial directness distinct from the comparable shin-hanga work of the Watanabe program, with the cutting marks of the artist's own gouge supplying part of the expressive vocabulary of the design. Within Maeda's career the Tokyo cycle belongs alongside his Hokkaido and Sapporo subjects as a principal strand of his regional and metropolitan landscape work, and modern scholarship treats the project as evidence of the sosaku-hanga movement's engagement with urban subjects across the twentieth century. 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 sosaku-hanga metropolitan tradition.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 1 prints, created by Maeda Masao.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Maeda Masao (前田政雄).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Recollections of Tokyo series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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