Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake
About This Series
Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake, Hiratsuka Un'ichi's early documentary cycle of the city devastated by the 1 September 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the firestorms that followed, belongs to the formative phase of the artist's career, undertaken in his late twenties when he had only recently moved permanently from his native Matsue to Tokyo and was consolidating the practice of jiga jikoku jizuri, the self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock that he would do more than any contemporary to codify within the sosaku-hanga or creative print movement. Hiratsuka, who had studied briefly with Ishii Hakutei and trained himself in cutting through close observation of Edo-period blocks, turned his gouges to the smouldering ruins, improvised shelters, and bare survivors of the lower city in the months following the catastrophe, producing a sequence of sheets whose documentary urgency is unusual in the early sosaku-hanga literature. Each impression is a black-and-white sumizuri-e printed in carbon sumi on washi, the monochrome idiom Hiratsuka had committed himself to reviving as a serious modern medium after centuries in which polychrome ukiyo-e had dominated the woodblock, and the surfaces preserve direct evidence of his powerful, broadly massed cutting in cherry block, issued from his own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher. The earthquake sheets participate in the broader Taisho-period visual response to the disaster but are distinguished by the severity of their monochrome and the directness of their observation, and they anchor the early-career section of the institutional Hiratsuka collections preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka, Nagano.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake, Hiratsuka Un'ichi's early documentary cycle of the city devastated by the 1 September 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the firestorms that followed, belongs to the formative phase of the artist's career, undertaken in his late twenties when he had only recently moved permanently from his native Matsue to Tokyo and was consolidating the practice of jiga jikoku jizuri, the self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock that he would do more than any contemporary to codify within the sosaku-hanga or creative print movement. Hiratsuka, who had studied briefly with Ishii Hakutei and trained himself in cutting through close observation of Edo-period blocks, turned his gouges to the smouldering ruins, improvised shelters, and bare survivors of the lower city in the months following the catastrophe, producing a sequence of sheets whose documentary urgency is unusual in the early sosaku-hanga literature. Each impression is a black-and-white sumizuri-e printed in carbon sumi on washi, the monochrome idiom Hiratsuka had committed himself to reviving as a serious modern medium after centuries in which polychrome ukiyo-e had dominated the woodblock, and the surfaces preserve direct evidence of his powerful, broadly massed cutting in cherry block, issued from his own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher. The earthquake sheets participate in the broader Taisho-period visual response to the disaster but are distinguished by the severity of their monochrome and the directness of their observation, and they anchor the early-career section of the institutional Hiratsuka collections preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka, Nagano.
The Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake series contains 1 prints, created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi.
The Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake series was created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi (平塚運一).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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