Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Recollections of Tokyo, known in Japanese as Tokyo Kaiko Zue, is among the principal print suites of Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997), the Matsue-born foundational figure of the twentieth-century sosaku-hanga or creative print movement, undertaken in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a personal record of the older quarters of the capital before they were transformed by reconstruction, war, and postwar growth. As a founding member of the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai and the artist who, more than any other, codified the discipline of jiga jikoku jizuri, the doctrine of self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock, Hiratsuka issued the cycle from his own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher, in keeping with the movement's foundational rejection of the divided ukiyo-e production system. Each sheet is executed as a black-and-white sumizuri-e, the monochrome impression in carbon sumi on washi that Hiratsuka had spent the previous two decades reviving as a serious modern idiom after centuries in which color printing had dominated the medium, and the surfaces preserve direct evidence of his powerful, broadly massed cutting in cherry block. The subjects gather temple gates, shrine precincts, bridges, alleyways, and street corners of pre-war Tokyo, registered less as topographical record than as remembered atmosphere, with deep blacks weighted against reserved areas of paper to evoke the soot, stone, and timber of the unmodernized city. The Recollections cycle is documented in the holdings of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, where Hiratsuka's American admirers built a particularly deep collection during his 1962-1994 residence, and in the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka, Nagano, which preserves the most complete institutional holding of the artist's output.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Recollections of Tokyo, known in Japanese as Tokyo Kaiko Zue, is among the principal print suites of Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997), the Matsue-born foundational figure of the twentieth-century sosaku-hanga or creative print movement, undertaken in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a personal record of the older quarters of the capital before they were transformed by reconstruction, war, and postwar growth. As a founding member of the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai and the artist who, more than any other, codified the discipline of jiga jikoku jizuri, the doctrine of self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock, Hiratsuka issued the cycle from his own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher, in keeping with the movement's foundational rejection of the divided ukiyo-e production system. Each sheet is executed as a black-and-white sumizuri-e, the monochrome impression in carbon sumi on washi that Hiratsuka had spent the previous two decades reviving as a serious modern idiom after centuries in which color printing had dominated the medium, and the surfaces preserve direct evidence of his powerful, broadly massed cutting in cherry block. The subjects gather temple gates, shrine precincts, bridges, alleyways, and street corners of pre-war Tokyo, registered less as topographical record than as remembered atmosphere, with deep blacks weighted against reserved areas of paper to evoke the soot, stone, and timber of the unmodernized city. The Recollections cycle is documented in the holdings of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, where Hiratsuka's American admirers built a particularly deep collection during his 1962-1994 residence, and in the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka, Nagano, which preserves the most complete institutional holding of the artist's output.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 2 prints, created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi (平塚運一).
We currently have 2 of 2 known prints from the Recollections of Tokyo series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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