Ten Great Disciples of Shaka
About This Series
Ten Great Disciples of Shaka is a further grouping of the disciple figures from Shiko Munakata's signature cycle Nibosatsu Shaka judai deshi, in which the bodhisattvas Monju and Fugen flank the ten foremost disciples of the historical Buddha Shaka, the Sino-Japanese form of Shakyamuni. The cycle, on which Munakata's international reputation rests, was first conceived in 1939 and recarved across the 1940s and 1950s, the destruction of the original wartime blocks requiring renewed work, until the definitive set won him the Print Prize at the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennale and the Grand Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale, the prizes that opened his postwar international career and led to the 1970 award of the Japanese Order of Culture. Each disciple is set frontally in a tall columnar format, carved directly into yamazakura cherry block in the ita-e manner Munakata had developed in the 1930s, the body filling the sheet with a swirling calligraphic line and the disciple's name inscribed in the artist's idiosyncratic seal-script. Impressions are pulled in sumi on washi, with the densely worked black ground left without the registration of separate color blocks, and many are completed by uragashin verso-coloring, in which mineral pigments brushed onto the back of the translucent paper diffuse forward through the sheet to register as soft tints of vermilion, indigo, and ochre. Impressions of individual disciples are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and other principal museum collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Ten Great Disciples of Shaka is a further grouping of the disciple figures from Shiko Munakata's signature cycle Nibosatsu Shaka judai deshi, in which the bodhisattvas Monju and Fugen flank the ten foremost disciples of the historical Buddha Shaka, the Sino-Japanese form of Shakyamuni. The cycle, on which Munakata's international reputation rests, was first conceived in 1939 and recarved across the 1940s and 1950s, the destruction of the original wartime blocks requiring renewed work, until the definitive set won him the Print Prize at the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennale and the Grand Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale, the prizes that opened his postwar international career and led to the 1970 award of the Japanese Order of Culture. Each disciple is set frontally in a tall columnar format, carved directly into yamazakura cherry block in the ita-e manner Munakata had developed in the 1930s, the body filling the sheet with a swirling calligraphic line and the disciple's name inscribed in the artist's idiosyncratic seal-script. Impressions are pulled in sumi on washi, with the densely worked black ground left without the registration of separate color blocks, and many are completed by uragashin verso-coloring, in which mineral pigments brushed onto the back of the translucent paper diffuse forward through the sheet to register as soft tints of vermilion, indigo, and ochre. Impressions of individual disciples are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and other principal museum collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Ten Great Disciples of Shaka series contains 1 prints, created by Shiko Munakata.
The Ten Great Disciples of Shaka series was created by Shiko Munakata (棟方志功).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Ten Great Disciples of Shaka series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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