NEW YORK, NY.- For their autumn exhibition Scholten Japanese Art offers the work of two modern printmakers, Oda Kazuma (1881-1956), and Kishio Koizumi (1893-1945), both prominent members of the sosaku hanga (creative print) movement who shared an interest in depicting daily life in views of modern Japan, particularly following the transformation of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake. Although both embraced the ‘artist as creator’ ethos associated with sosaku hanga, they utilized varying techniques.

Part One: Oda Kazuma

Oda Kazuma was the leading color lithographer in Japan who also produced self-carved as well professionally published woodblock prints, the exhibition includes examples of his landscape and figural prints produced in all three modes of production.

Born in Tokyo in 1882 into family which had enjoyed koke ('high family') status under the shogunate, at the age of twelve he moved with his family moved to Osaka in 1894 where his elder brother Oda Tou (1873-1933) had established himself as a painter and worked as a lithographic technician. Four years later, Oda began studying drawing and lithography with Tou, and the following year he began working at a lithographic printing company in Hiroshima. In 1900 he went back to Tokyo for a period to begin further training with the lithographic artist Kaneko Masajiro (fl. ca. 1884-1900s). It must have been during that period that Oda was influenced by (and possibly met) the skilled lithographer and etching artist, Austrian ex-pat Emil Orlik (1870-1932) who was living in Japan from March 1900 until 1901. Oda returned to Tokyo again in 1903 to study Western-style painting with Kawamura Kiyoo (1899-1934) while also working at the Koshiba lithography studio. He began exhibiting watercolors in various exhibitions including in the first Bunten (government-sponsored exhibition) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907. An ukiyo-e enthusiast, Oda owned a collection of ehon (woodblock printed illustrated books) by the great 19th century painter and print designer, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), and published books on Edo period prints. Although he embraced the 'artist as creator' ethos of the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement throughout his career, primarily self-printing and self-publishing his own lithographs, Oda also produced six shin-hanga (new print) style woodblock prints with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885-1962) and utilized the Nihon Hanga-sha (Japan Print Company) to market some of his self-carved woodblock prints.

Part Two: Kishio Koizumi

Kishio Koizumi was a passionate sosaku-hanga artist dedicated to carving and printing his own woodblock prints. The gallery exhibition will have on view a selection from a complete set of Kishio Koizumi’s monumental series, One Hundred Pictures of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era (Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue), produced between 1928 and 1940. The complete series of 100 prints is being offered as a set with an original storage box, and every print will be available in Part Two of the online exhibition.

Kishio Koizumi was the fifth child in a family with six children in Shizuoka, a large city located on Honshu's southern coast. His father, Koizumi Ken'kichi, was a master calligrapher who had served the Tokugawa shogunal family, but after the Meiji Restoration he became a teacher and published a widely-used calligraphy manual. Young Kishio was not a robust child, but he displayed a talent for drawing, and in 1909 or 1910, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, he was sent to Tokyo to study art while living with a brother-in-law who resided at Seinenji, a Buddhist temple. He enrolled at the Western-style art school, the Japan Watercolor Academy (Nihon Suisaiga Kenkyusho) which had been founded in 1907 by the painters Oshita Tojiro (1870-1912), Ishii Hakutei (1882-1958), and Tobari Kogan (1882-1927) where he also studied with Maruyama Banka (1867-1942). Both Hakutei and Kogan would be instrumental in the development of the intertwined woodblock print movements on the horizon: sosaku-hanga (creative prints) and shin-hanga (new prints). Three years later, Koizumi apprenticed himself to Horikoshi Kan'ichiro, the block-carver who had produced the blocks for Kishio's father's calligraphy manuals. It is unclear how long he worked with Horikoshi, but by 1913 he was already producing his own sosaku-hanga, that is, self-carved and self-printed works, and it is thought that he may have carved blocks for other artists such as Tobari Kogan. In 1919 he participated in the first exhibition organized by the newly formed Japan Creative Print Cooperative Society (Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai) the art gallery at the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi. The following year he issued his first landscape series of twelve prints, Print Scenes of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo fukei hanga); and in 1924 he published a manual, How to Carve and Print Woodblocks (Mokuhan no horikata to surikata).

Scholten Japanese Art
Kazuma/Koizumi: Chasing Modernity
September 14th, 2023 - September 22nd, 2023