<b>SPRING EVENING</b> / Yasunori Taninaka1933<b>SOLD</b></em>

Details

Taninaka Yasunori was a Sosaku Hanga artist that danced to the beat of his own drum. His work draws much of its subject matter from the world of dreams and the subconscious. Taninaka learned the art of printmaking from Nagase Yoshiro in the early 1920s, when Nagase’s designs learned toward expressionism and later studied etching with Sekino during WWII. Most of Taninaka’s body of work are prints produced for small Sosaku Hanga magazines, such as Shiro to Kuro (White and Black). Though he made a reasonably good livelihood from his art, Taninaka was known to be thriftless. Near the end of the war, his home was destroyed in an air raid, and he found himself living in a temporary shack and sustaining himself with a small crop of pumpkins he was tending in the ruins of his home. Tragically, he died of malnutrition in 1946.

 In this design, “Spring Night,” Taninaka places himself in a dreamlike kaleidoscope landscape. The artist is depicted as the figure holding an open umbrella as he stares impishly at a police officer, whose silhouette is seen in the officer’s box at right. Clad in traditional Japanese wooden shoes, which are not known for their discreetness due to their distinctive sound, the artist has one foot in the air as he is about to walk down the winding staircase into a theatre where salacious entertainment promises a night full of festivities. Overhead, a moon-like streetlight dominates the sky, as it seems to bend towards human activity. There is a charming youthful exuberance in this design—the artist in a bustling night scene, flirting with vice and reveling in the anticipation for what the night may bring. For Taninaka, the night is bright with a luster that only a strong lust for life can provide.

Connoisseur's Note

“Spring Evening” is a woodblock printed executed by the artist for issue 35 of the Sosaku Hanga magazine Shiro to Kuro in 1933. It is self-printed by the artist and has hand-colored embellishments throughout, most noticeable in the uneven application of the green wash around the design, which differs on each impression.