Eight Women of Modern Times (Imayo fujin hattai no uchi)
Imayo fujin hattai no uchi
About This Series
Imayo fujin hattai no uchi, here translated as Eight Women of Modern Times, belongs to the small group of figure-print series in which Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955), the principal theorist and organizer of the sosaku-hanga movement, treated the female figure as a vehicle for the modernist redefinition of the Japanese print. Although Onchi is most fully identified with the abstract sheets of his late career, he returned across the prewar decades to the modan-garu, the modern woman of Taisho and early Showa urban life, in compositions whose lineage runs from his 1914 founding of the Tsukuhae circle through the bijin-ga of his friend and collaborator Ito Shinsui to his own original printmaking in which subject and surface were equally claimed for the artist's hand. Imayo, meaning of the present style or in the contemporary fashion, signals an explicit engagement with the new social types of interwar Tokyo, and Onchi's compositions distinguish themselves from the shin-hanga bijin-ga of the period by their flattened design, reductive color, and refusal of the kabuki-derived poses that publishers such as Watanabe Shozaburo continued to commission from other artists. As founder of the Ichimoku-kai, the First Thursday Society print club through which Onchi gathered Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Yamaguchi Gen, and other postwar sosaku-hanga colleagues, he worked outside the commercial publishing system and produced his figure prints in small, often self-printed editions for circulation among collectors, fellow artists, and the Tokyo American community that built early Western holdings of his work. The Imayo fujin series is consistent with this artisanal model of production, the sheets printed by the artist himself or under his direct supervision and issued without the carver-printer division of labor characteristic of shin-hanga. Impressions of Onchi figure subjects from the 1920s and 1930s are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Onchi family collection, and the major American holdings of sosaku-hanga at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Imayo fujin hattai no uchi, here translated as Eight Women of Modern Times, belongs to the small group of figure-print series in which Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955), the principal theorist and organizer of the sosaku-hanga movement, treated the female figure as a vehicle for the modernist redefinition of the Japanese print. Although Onchi is most fully identified with the abstract sheets of his late career, he returned across the prewar decades to the modan-garu, the modern woman of Taisho and early Showa urban life, in compositions whose lineage runs from his 1914 founding of the Tsukuhae circle through the bijin-ga of his friend and collaborator Ito Shinsui to his own original printmaking in which subject and surface were equally claimed for the artist's hand. Imayo, meaning of the present style or in the contemporary fashion, signals an explicit engagement with the new social types of interwar Tokyo, and Onchi's compositions distinguish themselves from the shin-hanga bijin-ga of the period by their flattened design, reductive color, and refusal of the kabuki-derived poses that publishers such as Watanabe Shozaburo continued to commission from other artists. As founder of the Ichimoku-kai, the First Thursday Society print club through which Onchi gathered Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Yamaguchi Gen, and other postwar sosaku-hanga colleagues, he worked outside the commercial publishing system and produced his figure prints in small, often self-printed editions for circulation among collectors, fellow artists, and the Tokyo American community that built early Western holdings of his work. The Imayo fujin series is consistent with this artisanal model of production, the sheets printed by the artist himself or under his direct supervision and issued without the carver-printer division of labor characteristic of shin-hanga. Impressions of Onchi figure subjects from the 1920s and 1930s are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Onchi family collection, and the major American holdings of sosaku-hanga at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The Eight Women of Modern Times (Imayo fujin hattai no uchi) series contains 1 prints, created by Onchi Koshiro.
The Eight Women of Modern Times (Imayo fujin hattai no uchi) series was created by Onchi Koshiro (恩地孝四郎).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Eight Women of Modern Times (Imayo fujin hattai no uchi) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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