Happiness

Happiness gathers a small group of lyrical compositions by Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955) under a title that, in the artist's vocabulary, signals the affective and musical foundation of his mature work rather than any narrative subject. Onchi, the founder of the sosaku-hanga movement and from 1939 of the Ichimoku-kai print society that gathered Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Yamaguchi Gen, and other colleagues for monthly mutual criticism, came increasingly across the 1930s and 1940s to the conviction that the woodblock print could be the equal of lyric poetry and chamber music in its capacity to register inner state, and his titled suites of the period adopt poetic or affective rather than topographical headings. The Happiness sheets are executed in the autonomous sosaku-hanga manner that Onchi had defined in his 1942 essay Hanga no chishiki (Knowledge of the print) and other writings, in which the carved block is treated as the direct medium of the artist rather than the reproductive vehicle of a preparatory drawing, and the printing of small editions is performed by the artist or under his immediate supervision rather than by trade printers. The compositions exemplify Onchi's late-prewar movement toward semi-abstraction, in which figural or floral motif dissolves into rhythmic field and color is freed from descriptive function, anticipating the fully abstract sheets that would consolidate his international reputation after the war and that, through Oliver Statler's 1956 book Modern Japanese Prints and the postwar American collecting enthusiasm for sosaku-hanga, brought his work into the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.

The Happiness series contains 1 prints, created by Onchi Koshiro.

The Happiness series was created by Onchi Koshiro (恩地孝四郎).

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