Scenes of the Season
About This Series
Scenes of the Season gathers a group of Shiko Munakata's seasonal compositions in the artist's signature ita-e manner, the term he preferred to mokuhanga for the cherry-block prints he carved and pulled by hand from the early 1930s onward. The series belongs to the broad family of saiji or seasonal subjects that runs throughout Munakata's mature work, in which the Japanese annual cycle of plum, cherry, hagi bush clover, chrysanthemum, and snow is fused with the artist's unmistakable vocabulary of swirling cursive line, broadly massed black ground, and figural archetypes drawn from Buddhist and folk tradition. Although Munakata is best known internationally for the monumental Buddhist cycles that earned him the Print Prize at the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennale, the Grand Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale, and the Japanese Order of Culture in 1970, the more intimate seasonal sheets occupied him throughout his career as commissioned illustrations, calendar plates, and gift impressions for the literary and tea-ceremony circles that supported his work. The compositions are executed in sumi on washi, with cherry blocks cut directly without preparatory drawing, and many impressions show the verso-coloring or uragashin by which mineral pigments are brushed onto the back of the sheet so that pale rose, indigo, and green migrate forward through the translucent paper. The seasonal sheets exemplify Munakata's argument that hanga is at once a religious, calligraphic, and decorative art, and impressions of related saiji subjects are preserved in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the print collections of major American university museums that built holdings of postwar Japanese hanga in the 1950s and 1960s.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Scenes of the Season gathers a group of Shiko Munakata's seasonal compositions in the artist's signature ita-e manner, the term he preferred to mokuhanga for the cherry-block prints he carved and pulled by hand from the early 1930s onward. The series belongs to the broad family of saiji or seasonal subjects that runs throughout Munakata's mature work, in which the Japanese annual cycle of plum, cherry, hagi bush clover, chrysanthemum, and snow is fused with the artist's unmistakable vocabulary of swirling cursive line, broadly massed black ground, and figural archetypes drawn from Buddhist and folk tradition. Although Munakata is best known internationally for the monumental Buddhist cycles that earned him the Print Prize at the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennale, the Grand Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale, and the Japanese Order of Culture in 1970, the more intimate seasonal sheets occupied him throughout his career as commissioned illustrations, calendar plates, and gift impressions for the literary and tea-ceremony circles that supported his work. The compositions are executed in sumi on washi, with cherry blocks cut directly without preparatory drawing, and many impressions show the verso-coloring or uragashin by which mineral pigments are brushed onto the back of the sheet so that pale rose, indigo, and green migrate forward through the translucent paper. The seasonal sheets exemplify Munakata's argument that hanga is at once a religious, calligraphic, and decorative art, and impressions of related saiji subjects are preserved in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the print collections of major American university museums that built holdings of postwar Japanese hanga in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Scenes of the Season series contains 1 prints, created by Shiko Munakata.
The Scenes of the Season series was created by Shiko Munakata (棟方志功).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Scenes of the Season series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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