Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Recollections of Tokyo is the English designation under which a body of Saito Kiyoshi metropolitan prints circulates in Western cataloguing, gathering the Tokyo cycles through which the foundational sosaku-hanga artist addressed the postwar capital across his mature career. Saito Kiyoshi, born in 1907 in Fukushima and largely self-taught as a printmaker before his emergence within the sosaku-hanga movement in the late 1930s, established his international reputation through his joint first prize at the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennale, an award that he shared with the painter Komai Tetsuro and that marked the first major international recognition of any Japanese postwar artist. The Sao Paulo prize positioned Saito as the central figure of the postwar sosaku-hanga generation and brought sustained Western attention to a Japanese print movement that the prewar shin-hanga had largely overshadowed in international collections, and his subsequent career across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw the development of a mature woodblock vocabulary built around bold compositional simplification, exposed wood-grain texture, and a palette calibrated to the natural materials of the medium. The Tokyo cycles belong to the body of metropolitan work through which Saito addressed the modern Japanese city in dialogue with the parallel sosaku-hanga Tokyo prints of Onchi Koshiro, Maekawa Senpan, and Maeda Masao, and the recollections format positioned the project as a deliberate exercise in memory of the city as it had been or as the artist remembered it across his decades of residence. 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, was Saito's central practice across his career, and the Tokyo prints accordingly carry the authorial directness and direct trace of the gouge that distinguished his work from the publisher-led shin-hanga of the Watanabe program. Within Saito's career the Tokyo cycle belongs to the body of urban and landscape work that established his mature manner, alongside his celebrated Aizu winter subjects, his Buddhist temple and Kyoto cycles, and the various series through which he addressed Japanese subjects in his distinctive modernist sosaku-hanga vocabulary. Modern scholarship treats Saito as one of the defining sosaku-hanga artists of the postwar period and as the principal figure through whom the movement entered the international print market, and his Tokyo prints supply evidence of how the sosaku-hanga method could be brought to bear on metropolitan subjects. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Recollections of Tokyo is the English designation under which a body of Saito Kiyoshi metropolitan prints circulates in Western cataloguing, gathering the Tokyo cycles through which the foundational sosaku-hanga artist addressed the postwar capital across his mature career. Saito Kiyoshi, born in 1907 in Fukushima and largely self-taught as a printmaker before his emergence within the sosaku-hanga movement in the late 1930s, established his international reputation through his joint first prize at the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennale, an award that he shared with the painter Komai Tetsuro and that marked the first major international recognition of any Japanese postwar artist. The Sao Paulo prize positioned Saito as the central figure of the postwar sosaku-hanga generation and brought sustained Western attention to a Japanese print movement that the prewar shin-hanga had largely overshadowed in international collections, and his subsequent career across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw the development of a mature woodblock vocabulary built around bold compositional simplification, exposed wood-grain texture, and a palette calibrated to the natural materials of the medium. The Tokyo cycles belong to the body of metropolitan work through which Saito addressed the modern Japanese city in dialogue with the parallel sosaku-hanga Tokyo prints of Onchi Koshiro, Maekawa Senpan, and Maeda Masao, and the recollections format positioned the project as a deliberate exercise in memory of the city as it had been or as the artist remembered it across his decades of residence. 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, was Saito's central practice across his career, and the Tokyo prints accordingly carry the authorial directness and direct trace of the gouge that distinguished his work from the publisher-led shin-hanga of the Watanabe program. Within Saito's career the Tokyo cycle belongs to the body of urban and landscape work that established his mature manner, alongside his celebrated Aizu winter subjects, his Buddhist temple and Kyoto cycles, and the various series through which he addressed Japanese subjects in his distinctive modernist sosaku-hanga vocabulary. Modern scholarship treats Saito as one of the defining sosaku-hanga artists of the postwar period and as the principal figure through whom the movement entered the international print market, and his Tokyo prints supply evidence of how the sosaku-hanga method could be brought to bear on metropolitan subjects. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 1 prints, created by Saito Kiyoshi.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Saito Kiyoshi (斎藤清).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Recollections of Tokyo series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Recollections of Tokyo?
Sign up to start rating