<b>SETO INLAND SEA</b> / Kunzo Minami1911<b>SOLD</b></em>

Details

Kunzo Minami is best remembered as an oil painter and watercolorist and is known to have produced countless 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 an expansive seaside view from the Japanese countryside. The landscape is bathed in light and 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, which are 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. 

This work, as with all of Minami’s prints, 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

Minami’s self-printed work is highly sought after by sosaku hanga aficionados and institutions. Though his print designs were compelling, the artist did not produce them in quantity and are among the rarest of the sosaku hanga genre. Of his body of work, Minami’s print output number fewer than ten designs, this being his largest compositions. The pencil signature at the bottom further bolsters this impression’s desirability as the artist did not always pencil sign his prints in Western script.