TAKEHISA YUMEJI • Κορίτσι από την Άγρια Φύση • Ιαπωνική Ξυλογραφία - Ιαπωνία - 20th century

Artist: Takehisa Yumeji (竹久夢二, 1884–1934)
Title: Kōya no Musume — Girl from the Wilderness
Series: 竹久夢二木版画集 — A Collection of Takehisa Yumeji's Pictures in Woodblock Print
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome with soft bokashi shading
Date: c. 1978–1980 (after an early-20th-century Taishō painting design)
Publisher: Kyoto Hanga-in (京都版画院)
Format: Large format — ca. 49.5 x 38.5 cm
Signature & Seals: Title inscribed and Yumeji signature with red seal at lower left; series title and publisher seal (京都版画院版) in the margins; carver and printer seals at left
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IMPRESSION & COLOUR

A delicately printed sheet built almost entirely in soft, unsaturated tones.

PAPER & CONDITION

Excellent. The sheet is intact.
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The Scene — A Modern Girl in the Wild

A girl stands alone in an empty, grass-blown field that rolls away to a low grey horizon. She is unmistakably modern — a soft cap over bobbed hair, a plaid muffler knotted at the throat, a striped skirt, ankle boots, bare legs — and she cradles a mandolin, fingers poised over the strings, her gaze turned out toward us. There is no village, no companion, only the wide moor and the wind moving through the susuki grass. It is one of Yumeji's most quietly affecting images: the cosmopolitan young woman of the new century set down in a vast, lonely landscape, half wanderer, half dreamer.

The title — Kōya no Musume, "Girl from the Wilderness" — names the mood exactly. The contrast of fashionable Western dress against open wasteland gives the design its melancholy charge, the very sentiment of Taishō roman: youth, freedom, and a faint, pervasive loneliness, all carried in Yumeji's spare and expressive line.
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The Series

This sheet shows Yumeji's signature subject at its most characteristic: the wistful, slender "Yumeji-shiki bijin" — a type modelled in large part on his first wife Tamaki — caught in a quiet moment beneath blossoming plum, a wicker basket cradled in her arms. These images of women with large, melancholy eyes had a major influence on the world of Japanese art, and the pairing of a solitary beauty with ume blossom — one of the most loaded seasonal motifs in Japanese painting, signalling quiet resilience and the first stirrings of spring — sits comfortably within the lyrical, Taishō-romantic mood for which Yumeji remains best known.
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Takehisa Yumeji — Poet of the Taishō Beauty

Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) was the leading artist-illustrator of Japan's Taishō era, and a poet and songwriter besides. His romantic portraits of slender, languid young women — drawn with expressive line and a wistful, almost childlike air — were enormously popular, and he designed prints, covers, and illustrations for newspapers, women's magazines, and books. The look became known simply as "Yumeji-style" beauty.

There was little interest in his work abroad during his lifetime, but in the decades since his death Yumeji's images have been keenly sought by collectors. A museum devoted to him stands in Okayama, his birthplace.