Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is a collaborative print album of the early 1940s in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists gathered around Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955) 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. The project belongs to the Ichimoku-kai milieu that Onchi convened from the late 1930s onward, in which Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, Azechi Umetaro, Yamaguchi Gen, and others met on the first Thursday of each month for mutual criticism and the planning of joint publications, and the recollective title acknowledges the urban transformation, eventually the wartime destruction, that overtook the city during the project's gestation. As principal organizer of the album Onchi contributed multiple sheets in his distinctive sosaku-hanga manner, in which the carved block is treated as an autonomous expressive surface rather than as the reproductive vehicle of a preparatory drawing, the printed surface registering the artist's own carving, inking, and pulling. The series was issued in a small numbered edition for circulation among subscribers and is among the principal documents of the prewar and wartime sosaku-hanga movement, in which Onchi's role as theorist, organizer, and senior practitioner consolidated the network of artists who would emerge as the leading printmakers of postwar Japan. Impressions of Tokyo kaiko zue are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art among other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (3)
Frequently Asked Questions
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is a collaborative print album of the early 1940s in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists gathered around Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955) 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. The project belongs to the Ichimoku-kai milieu that Onchi convened from the late 1930s onward, in which Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, Azechi Umetaro, Yamaguchi Gen, and others met on the first Thursday of each month for mutual criticism and the planning of joint publications, and the recollective title acknowledges the urban transformation, eventually the wartime destruction, that overtook the city during the project's gestation. As principal organizer of the album Onchi contributed multiple sheets in his distinctive sosaku-hanga manner, in which the carved block is treated as an autonomous expressive surface rather than as the reproductive vehicle of a preparatory drawing, the printed surface registering the artist's own carving, inking, and pulling. The series was issued in a small numbered edition for circulation among subscribers and is among the principal documents of the prewar and wartime sosaku-hanga movement, in which Onchi's role as theorist, organizer, and senior practitioner consolidated the network of artists who would emerge as the leading printmakers of postwar Japan. Impressions of Tokyo kaiko zue are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art among other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 3 prints, created by Onchi Koshiro.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Onchi Koshiro (恩地孝四郎).
We currently have 3 of 3 known prints from the Recollections of Tokyo series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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