The Tale of the Auklet (Uto Hanga-kan)
Uto Hanga-kan
About This Series
The Tale of the Auklet, known in Japanese as Uto Hanga-kan, is among the literary print cycles that Shiko Munakata (1903-1975) drew from regional folklore and classical narrative, applying his ita-e idiom of carved cherry block and sumi-on-washi to a story rooted in the seabird mythology of northern Japan. The auklet, or uto, is a small alcid associated in Tohoku coastal tradition with poignant parent-child legends, and Munakata, an Aomori native who returned compulsively to the imagery of his home prefecture, used the bird's tale as scaffolding for a series of densely carved black-and-white panels in which figural narrative dissolves into the artist's characteristic field of swirling line and saturated ink. The cycle belongs to the postwar phase of Munakata's career, the period after his 1945 evacuation to Toyama in which devotional, folkloric, and poetic subjects increasingly took precedence over single-sheet compositions, and it shares the format of his other extended hanga-kan, or print scrolls, in which multiple sheets read in sequence as a unified pictorial poem. Each block was cut directly into yamazakura cherry without preparatory drawing, a method Munakata described as letting the wood speak its own subject, and several impressions are completed with uragashin, the verso-coloring technique by which mineral pigments applied behind translucent washi diffuse forward through the paper to register as soft, glowing tints around the ink. The series exemplifies Munakata's fusion of sosaku-hanga craft autonomy with the narrative impulse of Buddhist sutra illustration and emaki picture-scroll tradition, and impressions of related Uto subjects are documented in the holdings of the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and various American museum collections that acquired Munakata work in the wake of his 1956 Venice Biennale Grand Prize.
Prints in This Series (4)
Frequently Asked Questions
The Tale of the Auklet, known in Japanese as Uto Hanga-kan, is among the literary print cycles that Shiko Munakata (1903-1975) drew from regional folklore and classical narrative, applying his ita-e idiom of carved cherry block and sumi-on-washi to a story rooted in the seabird mythology of northern Japan. The auklet, or uto, is a small alcid associated in Tohoku coastal tradition with poignant parent-child legends, and Munakata, an Aomori native who returned compulsively to the imagery of his home prefecture, used the bird's tale as scaffolding for a series of densely carved black-and-white panels in which figural narrative dissolves into the artist's characteristic field of swirling line and saturated ink. The cycle belongs to the postwar phase of Munakata's career, the period after his 1945 evacuation to Toyama in which devotional, folkloric, and poetic subjects increasingly took precedence over single-sheet compositions, and it shares the format of his other extended hanga-kan, or print scrolls, in which multiple sheets read in sequence as a unified pictorial poem. Each block was cut directly into yamazakura cherry without preparatory drawing, a method Munakata described as letting the wood speak its own subject, and several impressions are completed with uragashin, the verso-coloring technique by which mineral pigments applied behind translucent washi diffuse forward through the paper to register as soft, glowing tints around the ink. The series exemplifies Munakata's fusion of sosaku-hanga craft autonomy with the narrative impulse of Buddhist sutra illustration and emaki picture-scroll tradition, and impressions of related Uto subjects are documented in the holdings of the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and various American museum collections that acquired Munakata work in the wake of his 1956 Venice Biennale Grand Prize.
The The Tale of the Auklet (Uto Hanga-kan) series contains 5 prints, created by Shiko Munakata.
The The Tale of the Auklet (Uto Hanga-kan) series was created by Shiko Munakata (棟方志功).
We currently have 4 of 5 known prints from the The Tale of the Auklet (Uto Hanga-kan) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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