Kawase Hasui
Daybreak over Lake Yamanaka
1931

Name: Daybreak over Lake Yamanaka
Brand: Kawase Hasui
Price: 6000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Daybreak over Lake Yamanaka Color woodcut, 1931 Published by the Watanabe Color Print Co. Watanabe seal "D" (1931-1941) See photo Pre-war design and pre-war printing Lake Yamanaka is the largest of the Fuji Five Lakes Condition: Excellent Image size: 14 3/8 x 9 3/8 inches Sheet size: 15 3/8 x 10 inches Reference: Brown 252, illustrated Kawase Hasui 1883-1957 Hasui was born with the given name Bunjiro in Tokyo, the son of a merchant family. As a child Hasui learned to paint in Western style. His first teacher was Saburosuke Okada (1869-1939) who taught him watercolor and oil painting. His family wanted Hasui to work in the family business, and was not very happy about his artistic. The conflict was solved when the family business went into bankruptcy. At the age of 26 Kawase applied to be a student by Kiyokata Kaburagi (1878-1972), a painter in traditional Japanese style. But Kaburagi considered him to be too old and rejected him. Kawase tried it again two years later and was finally accepted. Kiyokata soon recognized the talents of his student and introduced him to Watanabe Shozaburo. Kawase had a tight and lifelong cooperation with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885-1962). Watanabe was the initiator and driving commercial force of the shin hanga movement. When traditional ukiyo-e printmaking was close to extinction, he gathered a handful of starving artists around him and gave them commissions for prints. Watanabe's business idea was to target these prints at art lovers. Before, ukiyo-e was a kind of mass consumer product. In this function it had no chance against photography and by the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century it seemed to be doomed to disappear. Hasui Kawase created more than a hundred woodblock prints between 1918 and 1923 - all published by Watanabe Shozaburo. Most of these "new style" prints were exported - mainly to the United States. Then, on September 1, 1923, Japan was hit by one of the worst earthquakes in history. About 140,000 people died in the Kanto earthquake and the fires that raged for days. The center of the earthquake was in the Tokyo and Yokohama area. Watanabe's print shop was destroyed by the fire and with it all of Kawase's print blocks. The artist’s home with with all of his sketchbooks was also destroyed. Kawase and Watanabe had to start again from scratch. The artist produced more than 400 woodblock designs for Watanabe until his death in 1957. In 1956 Kawase was named a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government. It is the greatest honor an artist can experience in post-war Japan and he was the first to receive this outstanding title. He died only one year after this great honor at the age of 74. Courtesy: Artelino

Creator:

Kawase Hasui (1883-1957, Japanese)

Creation Year:

1931

Dimensions:

Height: 14.38 in (36.53 cm)Width: 8.38 in (21.29 cm)

Medium:

Woodcut

Period:

1930-1939

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Fairlawn, OH

Reference Number:

Seller: UK17211stDibs: LU14014082912

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Kawase Hasui

Hasui Kawase (Japanese, 1883 -1957) was an artist, one of modern Japan's most important and prolific printmakers. He was a prominent designer of the shin-hanga ("new prints") movement, whose artists depicted traditional subjects with a style influenced by Western art. Like many earlier ukiyo-e prints, Hasui's works were commonly landscapes, but displayed atmospheric effects and natural lighting. Hasui designed approximately 620 prints over a career that spanned nearly forty years. Towards the end of his life the government recognized him as a Living National Treasure for his contribution to Japanese culture. From youth Hasui dreamed of an art career. His maternal uncle was Kanagaki Robun (1829–94), a Japanese author and journalist, who produced the first manga magazine. Hasui went to the school of the painter Aoyagi Bokusen as a young man. He sketched from nature, copied the masters' woodblock prints, and studied brush painting with Araki Kanyu. His parents had him take on the family rope and thread wholesaling business, but its bankruptcy when he was 26 freed him to pursue art. He approached Kiyokata Kaburagi to teach him, but Kaburagi instead encouraged him to study Western-style painting, which he did with Okada Saburōsuke for two years. Two years later he again applied as a student to Kaburagi, who this time accepted him. Kiyokata bestowed the name Hasui upon him, which can be translated as "water gushing from a spring", and derives from his elementary school combined with an ideogram of his family name. Kawase studied ukiyo-e and Japanese style painting at the studio of Kiyokata Kaburagi. He mainly concentrated on making watercolors of actors, everyday life and landscapes, many of them published as illustrations in books and magazines in the last few years of the Meiji period and early Taishō period. Kawase worked almost exclusively on landscape and townscape prints based on sketches and watercolors he made in Tokyo and during travels around Japan. However, his prints are not merely meishō (famous places) prints that are typical of earlier ukiyo-e masters such as Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Kawase's prints feature locales that are tranquil and obscure in urbanizing Japan. Hasui Kawase's works are currently kept in several museums worldwide, including the British Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Stanley Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, the Clark Art Institute, the Smart Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.