Background
Artist Biography: Oda Kazuma (織田一麿 1882-1956), born in Tokyo, studied Western-style painting with Kawamura Kiyo-o (1852-1934) and lithography with his elder brother Oda Tôu (a painter and lithograph printer in Osaka) as well as with Kaneko Masajirô (active 1884-early 1900s). In 1903 he worked as a designer at the Koshiba lithography studio in Tokyo. Around that time, or shortly before, he probably met the Prague-born Emil Orlik (1870-1932), whose lithographic prints were an inspiration. Although Oda worked primarily as a lithographer, he was also a ukiyo-e enthusiast, publishing two books on the subject — Ukiyo-e jûhachi kô (Eighteen studies of ukiyo-e) and Ukiyo-e to sashi-e geijutsu (Ukiyo-e and the art of illustration). In 1908, he contributed lithographs to the coterie magazine Hôsun ("Square Inch"). In the 1910s he produced sets of lithographs depicting scenes from Tokyo (Tokyo fûkei hangashû, Collection of prints of scenes in Tokyo, 1916-17) and Osaka (Osaka fûkei hangashû, Collection of prints of scenes in Osaka, 1917-19). He also designed six shin-hanga-style woodblock prints for the publisher Watanabe Shôzaburô in 1924. Oda was the only lithographer included in the ground-breaking Toledo Museum of Art exhibition of 1930.
Oda participated in several art societies and was a founding member of the Nihon Sôsaku-Hanga Kyôkai (Japan Creative-Print Association: 日本創作版画協会) in 1918, when he was its only lithographer, as well as the the Yôfû Hangakai (Western-Style Print Society: 洋風版画会) in 1929-30 and the Nihon Hanga Kyôkai (Japan Print Association: 日本洋画協会) in 1931. Years later, in 1953, he opened his own private Oda Lithography Studio (Oda Sekihanjutsu Kenkyûjo). A prolific artist, the vast majority of his oeuvre was in the medium of lithography. His self-published prints were produced in small editions.
Design
Aside from producing his many lithographs, Oda Kazuma straddled the two main woodblock printmaking genres in Japan. Known for his self-published sôsaku hanga (creative prints: 創作版画), he occasionally participated in designing woodcuts in the shin hanga (new print; 新版画) mode with designs for professional carvers and printers (see ODK01).
The Nihonbashi district (日本橋付近) was a major mercantile center during the Edo period. Its early development is largely credited to the Mitsui family, who based their wholesaling business in Nihonbashi and developed Japan's first department store, the Mitsukoshi (三越). The first fish market in Tokyo was originally located in the Nihonbashi district, next to the Nihonbashi bridge that gave the area its name. The Edo-period Nihonbashi is familiar to collectors and scholars of ukiyo-e, especially as portrayed in the various Tôkaidô series of landscape prints.
The Great Kantō earthquake on September 1, 1923 devastated much of central Tokyo, including the Nihonbashi fish market and the Mitsukoshi. The government, which already had plans to relocate the market due to its unsanitary conditions considered unsuitable for an area that had developed into a business center, took the opportunity to move the market to Tsukiji (築地) located in central Tokyo between the Sumida River and the upmarket Ginza shopping district.
Oda's view of Nihonbashi depicts, it seems, a reconstructed district that rose from the ashes of the 1923 earthquake and fires. It is a fine sunlit scene, with soft diagonal gray shadows on the building at the right. In the distance, a textured horizon in hues of blue and violet can be seen below an expanse of light blue for the sky. Some of the buildings, too, are colored in pastel shades of red, yellow, blue, and violet. It is a view of delicacy and refinement created in woodblock.
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo has more than 160 lithographs and color woodcuts by Oda. Works by Oda Kazuma are also held in various museums in Europe and the U.S., including the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Toledo Museum of Art.
References
- Putney, Brown, Koyama, Binnie: Fresh Impressions: Early Modern Japanese Prints. Toledo Museum of Art, 2014, pp. 210-11.
- Reigle-Stephens, The new wave: Twentieth-century Japanese prints from the Robert O. Muller Collection. Leiden: Hotei, 1993, pp. 135-136.
- Tokyo kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan shozô-hin mokuroku (Catalogue of Collections [Modern Prints]: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo,: 東京国立近代美術館所蔵品目録). 1993, nos. 425-588.
- Uhlenbeck, Newland, and de Vries: Waves of renewal: modern Japanese prints from the Nihon no hanga collection. Amsterdam: 2016, pp. 125-130.
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