Hasui Kawase

Who

Japanese landscape print designer, born in Tokyo on 18 May 1883 and dead on 7 November 1957. He turned to art after the family's rope and thread business went bankrupt when he was 26, studied with the painter Kaburagi Kiyokata, and from 1918 designed prints for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo for four decades: over six hundred of them.

Why they matter

He is the premier landscape artist of shin-hanga, the "new prints" movement in which Watanabe set out to revive traditional woodblock printing, with its division of labour between designer, carver and printer, for modern tastes and especially for Western collectors. His prints are about light, weather and atmosphere - snow, rain and night - rather than story, and in 1956 he was named a Living National Treasure.

What to buy

Originals: Hasui's designs are still being printed, and that is the whole story of buying him. He did not carve or print himself; Watanabe's craftsmen did, and the Watanabe firm has gone on printing his designs since his death. Lifetime impressions, dated by the Watanabe publisher's seal in the margin, are what collectors pay most for, and prints made before the 1923 earthquake are prized for their rarity. Posthumous Watanabe printings carry later seals: from 1989 a red rectangular Heisei seal as well, and from 2019 a Reiwa seal. They are high-quality impressions on clean paper and the cheapest honest way in, but some are sold at lifetime-edition prices, so read the seals before you pay; the difference between the lifetime and posthumous publisher seals can be a matter of a millimetre. Dealers also warn of recent reproductions bearing the seal of another publisher, Doi. Look for fresh colour, clean paper and good margins, since many Hasui prints fade easily. Books: Kendall H. Brown's Kawase Hasui: The Complete Woodblock Prints (Hotei, 2003, two volumes) catalogues all 613 designs with facsimiles of the seals and signatures; Brown's Visions of Japan is the usual introduction. Prints: he is in copyright until 2028, so buy licensed reproductions, not print-on-demand copies.

Notes

The Art Institute of Chicago shows a large Hasui holding online. The British Museum, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston also hold his work. His best-selling print was Zojo-ji Temple in Shiba of 1925; the second was Moon at Magome, from the same series.

Story

In 1923 the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed Watanabe's workshop in Tokyo. Hasui's blocks went with it, including finished blocks for prints not yet issued, and so did 188 of his sketchbooks. His pre-earthquake prints are rare today. Hasui's answer was to go travelling. Later that year he set out through the Hokuriku, San'in and San'yo regions, and when he came back in February 1924 after 102 days, the longest trip of his life, he turned the new sketches into his third Souvenirs of Travel series. Most of the designs he is known for were made after the disaster. In 1953 the government committee for intangible cultural treasures meant to honour him and Ito Shinsui, and ran into a problem the print trade had always had: a Hasui print was the joint work of a designer, a carver and a printer, and there were objections to singling out one of them. The committee's answer was to commission new prints and document every step of making them. Snow at Zojo-ji was finished in 1953, and its 42 separate printings were recorded for posterity. Hasui was named a Living National Treasure in 1956. He died the next year, and his last print, Hall of the Golden Hue, Hiraizumi, was issued after his death.

Key works

• Komagata Embankment, from Twelve Scenes of Tokyo (1919) - Art Institute of Chicago
• Matsue, Izumo, from Souvenirs of Travel, Third Series (1924) - Art Institute of Chicago
• Zojo-ji Temple in Shiba, from Twenty Views of Tokyo (1925) - series
• Snow at Zojo-ji (1953) - printed for the government's record of the craft
• Hall of the Golden Hue, Hiraizumi (1957) - his last print

See the work

Prints

Books

Originals

See also

Browse all 2,101 artists · Open in the directory · Where the work hangs: 12 museums on a map