Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists associated with the Ichimoku-kai 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 and street scenes. Azechi Umetaro (1902-1999) participated in the project alongside Onchi, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, Yamaguchi Gen, and other Ichimoku-kai colleagues, contributing one or more sheets in his characteristic sosaku-hanga manner of broadly massed color areas and reduced contour. Azechi, then a postal-service employee whose printmaking was conducted around his salaried work, had been brought into the sosaku-hanga circle in the 1930s through Hiratsuka's mentorship and would by the postwar period emerge as one of its most internationally recognized members through his mountain-and-folk-figure subjects, but the Tokyo kaiko zue sheets belong to the wartime phase in which he was still consolidating his graphic vocabulary. Each contribution is self-carved and self-printed in the manner that distinguished the Ichimoku-kai project from the carver-printer collaborations of shin-hanga, and the album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers. Impressions of the Tokyo kaiko zue including Azechi's contributions are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, 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 in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists associated with the Ichimoku-kai 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 and street scenes. Azechi Umetaro (1902-1999) participated in the project alongside Onchi, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, Yamaguchi Gen, and other Ichimoku-kai colleagues, contributing one or more sheets in his characteristic sosaku-hanga manner of broadly massed color areas and reduced contour. Azechi, then a postal-service employee whose printmaking was conducted around his salaried work, had been brought into the sosaku-hanga circle in the 1930s through Hiratsuka's mentorship and would by the postwar period emerge as one of its most internationally recognized members through his mountain-and-folk-figure subjects, but the Tokyo kaiko zue sheets belong to the wartime phase in which he was still consolidating his graphic vocabulary. Each contribution is self-carved and self-printed in the manner that distinguished the Ichimoku-kai project from the carver-printer collaborations of shin-hanga, and the album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers. Impressions of the Tokyo kaiko zue including Azechi's contributions are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 1 prints, created by Umetaro Azechi.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Umetaro Azechi (畦地梅太郎).
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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