Munakata's Tokaido (Tokaido Munakata hanga)
Tokaido Munakata hanga
About This Series
Munakata no Tokaido, or Munakata's Tokaido, is the artist's distinctive recasting of the most famous subject in Japanese landscape printmaking, the fifty-three post-stations of the Tokaido highway between Edo and Kyoto, treated in a series whose title openly acknowledges Utagawa Hiroshige's nineteenth-century precedent while announcing Munakata's intention to remake the subject in his own ita-e idiom. The cycle belongs to the postwar period of Munakata's career, when his international stature following the 1955 Sao Paulo and 1956 Venice prizes brought commissions for ambitious series projects, and the Tokaido subject offered both a national pictorial canon and a personal travelogue, the artist having frequently traveled the modern Tokaido corridor for exhibitions, lectures, and temple commissions. Each station is carved into cherry block without preparatory drawing in Munakata's characteristic manner and printed in sumi on washi, with several impressions completed by uragashin verso-coloring to register diffused tones of indigo, rose, or yellow ochre. Rather than the topographical specificity of Hiroshige's stations, Munakata's Tokaido offers each post-town as an emblematic figure or motif: a horseman, a pilgrim, a tea-house attendant, a famous local product or shrine, often inscribed with the station name in the artist's distinctive cursive calligraphy. The series argues for the continuity of the woodblock medium across the modern period, asserting that the same Tokaido that Hiroshige had set in ukiyo-e color could be reimagined for the postwar sosaku-hanga generation in monochrome sumi and direct block carving. Impressions are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, and major American museum collections.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Munakata no Tokaido, or Munakata's Tokaido, is the artist's distinctive recasting of the most famous subject in Japanese landscape printmaking, the fifty-three post-stations of the Tokaido highway between Edo and Kyoto, treated in a series whose title openly acknowledges Utagawa Hiroshige's nineteenth-century precedent while announcing Munakata's intention to remake the subject in his own ita-e idiom. The cycle belongs to the postwar period of Munakata's career, when his international stature following the 1955 Sao Paulo and 1956 Venice prizes brought commissions for ambitious series projects, and the Tokaido subject offered both a national pictorial canon and a personal travelogue, the artist having frequently traveled the modern Tokaido corridor for exhibitions, lectures, and temple commissions. Each station is carved into cherry block without preparatory drawing in Munakata's characteristic manner and printed in sumi on washi, with several impressions completed by uragashin verso-coloring to register diffused tones of indigo, rose, or yellow ochre. Rather than the topographical specificity of Hiroshige's stations, Munakata's Tokaido offers each post-town as an emblematic figure or motif: a horseman, a pilgrim, a tea-house attendant, a famous local product or shrine, often inscribed with the station name in the artist's distinctive cursive calligraphy. The series argues for the continuity of the woodblock medium across the modern period, asserting that the same Tokaido that Hiroshige had set in ukiyo-e color could be reimagined for the postwar sosaku-hanga generation in monochrome sumi and direct block carving. Impressions are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, and major American museum collections.
The Munakata's Tokaido (Tokaido Munakata hanga) series contains 2 prints, created by Shiko Munakata.
The Munakata's Tokaido (Tokaido Munakata hanga) series was created by Shiko Munakata (棟方志功).
We currently have 1 of 2 known prints from the Munakata's Tokaido (Tokaido Munakata hanga) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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