Scenes After theTokyo Earthquake
About This Series
Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake, the early documentary cycle in which Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997) recorded the devastated city in the months following the 1 September 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, belongs to the formative years of his sosaku-hanga or creative print practice, undertaken when the artist was still in his late twenties and freshly committed to the doctrine of jiga jikoku jizuri, the self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock that he would do more than any of his contemporaries to codify. The earthquake and the firestorms that followed destroyed great portions of the lower city, and Hiratsuka, who had moved permanently to Tokyo from his native Matsue earlier in the decade to study with Ishii Hakutei and to teach himself the woodblock technique he would soon master, turned his cutter to the smouldering ruins, makeshift shelters, and bare survivors with a documentary urgency unusual in the early sosaku-hanga literature. Each sheet is a black-and-white sumizuri-e printed in carbon sumi on washi, the monochrome idiom that Hiratsuka had committed himself to reviving as a serious modern medium, and the cutting registers the raw subject directly without the mediation of staff carvers. Issued from his own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher, the series participates in the broader visual response to the earthquake undertaken across the Taisho period by photographers, painters, and printmakers, but it is distinguished by the severity of its monochrome and the directness of its observation. The Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake sheets are documented in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka, Nagano, where they anchor the institutional understanding of his early career.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake, the early documentary cycle in which Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997) recorded the devastated city in the months following the 1 September 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, belongs to the formative years of his sosaku-hanga or creative print practice, undertaken when the artist was still in his late twenties and freshly committed to the doctrine of jiga jikoku jizuri, the self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock that he would do more than any of his contemporaries to codify. The earthquake and the firestorms that followed destroyed great portions of the lower city, and Hiratsuka, who had moved permanently to Tokyo from his native Matsue earlier in the decade to study with Ishii Hakutei and to teach himself the woodblock technique he would soon master, turned his cutter to the smouldering ruins, makeshift shelters, and bare survivors with a documentary urgency unusual in the early sosaku-hanga literature. Each sheet is a black-and-white sumizuri-e printed in carbon sumi on washi, the monochrome idiom that Hiratsuka had committed himself to reviving as a serious modern medium, and the cutting registers the raw subject directly without the mediation of staff carvers. Issued from his own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher, the series participates in the broader visual response to the earthquake undertaken across the Taisho period by photographers, painters, and printmakers, but it is distinguished by the severity of its monochrome and the directness of its observation. The Scenes After the Tokyo Earthquake sheets are documented in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka, Nagano, where they anchor the institutional understanding of his early career.
The Scenes After theTokyo Earthquake series contains 1 prints, created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi.
The Scenes After theTokyo Earthquake series was created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi (平塚運一).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Scenes After theTokyo Earthquake series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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