Details

Kunzo Minami is best remembered as an oil painter and watercolorist and is known to have produced an extensive array of noteworthy works blending traditional Japanese aesthetics within the confines of Western artistic perspectives. Minami was one of the first generations of artists who traveled to Europe and the United States and actively engaged within varied artistic communities while abroad. In addition to painting, Minami was also a sosaku hanga artist whose self-directed work was highly influential to other print artists such as Kogan Tobari, Koshiro Onchi, and Unichi Hiratsuka.

In this design, Minami presents the viewer with a striking composition of a small cottage and observation tower on top of a hill. The landscape is anchored by a vivid and bright palette that recollects Gauguin’s early scenes of Brittany. The design is inviting in its expressive and spontaneous style of printing. The vast majority of colors are printed on top of each other in a rather impressionistic manner. Unlike traditional woodblock prints produced before this work, the loose black outlines, sparsely populated within the design, no longer serve as a guide to outlining the composition but rather strengthen the soft expressionist quality of the overall printing.

As with all of Minami’s prints, this work is more related to the expressive quality of painting from this era than to the woodblock prints of Edo or the Meiji period. Much like the work of his contemporary, Yamamoto Kanae, Minami’s hanga is a decisive break from the past and charts the territory other sosaku hanga artists went further in exploring.

Connoisseur's Note

This design quickly became known as an early battle flag for the sosaku hanga movement. The artist’s abandonment of traditional keyblock outline, delignating the composition for a much more expressive over-printing technique, opened many eyes. Hanga was now an artistic medium where self-expression was possible. Due to Minami’s daring design, it is not surprising that this design was reworked into a slightly smaller version that was included in the dojin magazine Bijustsu Shinpô ("Art News"), Jan. 1912. Although produced for a magazine, this print was printed by hand and tipped into the publication. The magazine's circulation was less than 100, and surviving examples of this design are now quite scarce.

This impression is in excellent condition with pristine colors.