It’s Like Deja-vu All Over Again
By Michael O’Clair: A comparison of same subject prints published by two different artists. If you are interested in Japanese prints, you should look at as many of them as you …
Articles
Hasui Prints Published by Sakai and Kawaguchi: One Edition Doesn’t Fit All
By Darrel C. Karl It’s difficult enough for Japanese print collectors to keep track of how different publishers differentiate (if at all) between multiple editions of their own prints. However, …
A Rare Act to Follow
By Paul Griffith In the 4th month of 1795, two of the three major Kabuki theatres staged separate productions of the same play. The theatres were the Miyako-za and the …
Shinsui’s Enigmatic Fool on a Roof
By Doug Frazer: Fool on a Roof, 1921 is Shinsui’s 25th print for his publisher, Watanabe. This extremely rare pre-earthquake design to our knowledge, exists only in trial states, and …
Actor Prints and Kabuki, Inseparable
By Paul Griffith Yakusha-e Kabuki actor portraits are called yakusha-e, literally ‘actor pictures,’ and they are one of the major subjects depicted in ukiyo-e. Yakusha-e artists were an integral part …
Confessions of a Collector
By Michael O’Clair I first became interested in Japanese prints while I was in law school in New York City. There was a small gallery near my apartment on the …
Toraji’s “Reading” Print: A Case Study
by Darrel C. Karl I’ve always been fascinated by the manner in which artists conceive and realize their vision in the woodblock print medium. Some, like Kawase Hasui, would produce …
What is the Floating World?
It’s easy to find definitions for the term ukiyo-e, they exist throughout the internet and appear in nearly every treatise on the genre. The translation of ukiyo-e boils down to …
Shin Hanga
The term shin-hanga will always be associated with Shozaburo Watanabe, whose publishing enterprise is still producing as it enters its second century of business. Watanabe coined the term shin-hanga around …