COLLECTING JAPANESE PRINTS FEATURED CONTEMPORARY ARTIST

1891 - 1980

Hasegawa Kiyoshi was a contemporary artist and engraver born in Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1891. After completing his education at Meiji University, Hasegawa studied painting under Fujishima Takeji, Okada Saburosuke, and Kuroda Seiki. During his training, Hasegawa was also deeply influenced by the impressionist movement in Europe. In 1913, he collaborated with Nagase Yoshio and Hiroshima Shintaro to produce mokuhanga for the literary magazine Kamen. He became involved in the Tenshin-no-ko and Pan-no-Fue organizations. 

Three years later, Hasegawa established the Nihon Hanga organization with his two friends, and together they organized exhibitions for both Kamen and Nihon Hanga over the next two years. Hasegawa traveled to France in 1918, intending to stay for five years, but married a Frenchwoman and remained in the country for the rest of his life. He set to work establishing himself as a copper-plate printer and etcher, all the while retaining his membership with Shun'yokai and Nihon Hanga Kyokai organizations. He also kept in contact with his friends back in Japan and continued to send prints and illustrations for exhibitions. 

Hasegawa continued to produce and export a variety of works until his former teacher Okada Saburosuke visited France in April 1930 with an intriguing proposition: host the very first exhibition of sosaku hanga prints in Paris and present modernist prints as a progression in visual dialogues between Japan and the West. Hasegawa agreed on the condition of a strong, unified coalition of artists. Several months later, the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai and Yofu Hanga-kai organizations dissolved, and by the following January had merged to form the Nihon Hanga Kyokai. Hasegawa thus helped unite the organizations in preparation for the first sosaku hanga exhibition in Paris in 1934. He further helped arrange the 1934 exhibition and wrote the catalogue, L'Estampes Japonaises Modernes et ses Origines. It consisted of four hundred modern works, ten hanga books, and three hundred older prints, and was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts from February to April 1934. The overwhelming response to the exhibition led to a number of overseas exhibitions: two traveling shows popped up in Geneva and Madrid from February to June of 1936, and Contemporary Japanese Prints was held from July to December of 1937 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, London, Lyon, Warsaw, and Berlin. 

In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Hasegawa was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French Government in 1936. Hasegawa continued to produce works until his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine.