Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro and the Ichimoku-kai print society in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists revisited the topography of the imperial capital in a sequence of single-sheet compositions, each contributor producing one or more views of remembered Tokyo neighborhoods, monuments, and street scenes. Kawakami Sumio (1895-1972), the Tochigi-based sosaku-hanga artist whose mature subject matter centered on Japanese and Western Christian themes treated in a deliberately archaic folk idiom, contributed sheets to the project in his characteristic vocabulary of broadly massed color, naive frontal figure, and decorative ornamental ground. Kawakami, whose lifelong fascination with the early Christian and Nanban Edo-period contact between Japan and Europe shaped his iconography of Portuguese missionaries, mission churches, Madonnas, and biblical subjects rendered in the visual language of Japanese folk woodcut and Buddhist tankobon block-printed book illustration, brought to the Tokyo kaiko zue a distinctive sensibility shaped by his English-language teaching career in provincial Tochigi and his early encounter with European modernist illustration through Christian missionary publications. His sheets register the urban capital with the same folkloric directness he brought to Christian and Nanban subjects, treating Tokyo street life as a register of warmly observed everyday people in the manner that the prewar sosaku-hanga movement had developed in distinction from the atmospheric realism of contemporary shin-hanga. The album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers in the artisanal self-carved, self-printed manner that distinguished Ichimoku-kai projects from the carver-printer collaborations of Watanabe Shozaburo. Kawakami had also contributed to the earlier prewar Shin Tokyo hyakkei of 1928 to 1932, and his association with Onchi spanned the full arc of the sosaku-hanga movement. Impressions of the Tokyo kaiko zue including his contributions are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro and the Ichimoku-kai print society in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists revisited the topography of the imperial capital in a sequence of single-sheet compositions, each contributor producing one or more views of remembered Tokyo neighborhoods, monuments, and street scenes. Kawakami Sumio (1895-1972), the Tochigi-based sosaku-hanga artist whose mature subject matter centered on Japanese and Western Christian themes treated in a deliberately archaic folk idiom, contributed sheets to the project in his characteristic vocabulary of broadly massed color, naive frontal figure, and decorative ornamental ground. Kawakami, whose lifelong fascination with the early Christian and Nanban Edo-period contact between Japan and Europe shaped his iconography of Portuguese missionaries, mission churches, Madonnas, and biblical subjects rendered in the visual language of Japanese folk woodcut and Buddhist tankobon block-printed book illustration, brought to the Tokyo kaiko zue a distinctive sensibility shaped by his English-language teaching career in provincial Tochigi and his early encounter with European modernist illustration through Christian missionary publications. His sheets register the urban capital with the same folkloric directness he brought to Christian and Nanban subjects, treating Tokyo street life as a register of warmly observed everyday people in the manner that the prewar sosaku-hanga movement had developed in distinction from the atmospheric realism of contemporary shin-hanga. The album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers in the artisanal self-carved, self-printed manner that distinguished Ichimoku-kai projects from the carver-printer collaborations of Watanabe Shozaburo. Kawakami had also contributed to the earlier prewar Shin Tokyo hyakkei of 1928 to 1932, and his association with Onchi spanned the full arc of the sosaku-hanga movement. Impressions of the Tokyo kaiko zue including his contributions are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 1 prints, created by Sumio Kawakami.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Sumio Kawakami (川上澄生).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Recollections of Tokyo series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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