ONCHI KŌSHIRŌ • Cherry Blossom Time •auth. Sōsaku-hanga Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - 20th century

Artist: Onchi Kōshirō (恩地孝四郎, 1891–1955) — the acknowledged father of the sōsaku-hanga movement
Title: Hanadoki (花時) — "Cherry Blossom Time"
Series: Nihon Jozoku Sen (日本女俗選) — Selection of Women's Customs in Japan; a portfolio of ten prints by five leading sōsaku-hanga artists
Date: August 1946 (Shōwa 21)
Publisher: Fugaku Shuppansha (Fugaku Honsha), Tokyo; printed by the Takamizawa workshop from blocks carved by the artist
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — Sōsaku Hanga, water-based pigments on washi
Format: Sheet approx. 20.5 × 26.8 cm (8.1 × 10.6 inches)
Signature: Unsigned in the block, as issued for this portfolio
Condition: Excellent with nothing to note!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Why Sōsaku Hanga Deserves Your Attention

The creative print movement grew out of a specific objection. In the traditional system — ukiyo-e in the Edo period, shin-hanga in the twentieth century — a print was made by a chain of specialists: the artist supplied a design, a carver cut the blocks, a printer pulled the impressions, and a publisher commissioned and financed the whole thing and decided what was made. The sōsaku-hanga artists held that the finished sheet under such a system is not fully the artist's: it is the collective product of many participants, filtered through a carver's habits, a printer's judgement and a publisher's commercial calculation, and what reaches the paper is inevitably something other than what the artist saw.

Their answer was jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed. The artist takes the knife to the block and pulls the impressions personally, so that every decision from first line to final colour belongs to one person.
---------------------------------------------------------

The Scene — A Branch for the Vase

Beneath a canopy of cherry blossom and a spring sky washed in soft periwinkle, a young woman reaches up to a laden bough, a pair of hanabasami — the short, ring-handled clippers used in ikebana — in her hand. She is not idly admiring the blossoms: she is cutting a branch for flower arranging, and a scatter of loosened petals already drifts down past her sleeve. Weathered dark stones frame her at left and right, anchoring the airy composition and lending the scene the quiet of a garden or temple precinct.

Look closely at the kimono. Its pattern of short horizontal strokes in pink and lavender deliberately echoes the lenticels — the horizontal striations — of cherry bark, so that the woman and the tree she reaches into are woven from the same visual fabric. It is a characteristically thoughtful piece of design from an artist who believed a print should be a constructed harmony of form and colour, not a coloured drawing.

The Portfolio — Spring Prints in the Ruins of Tokyo

Nihon Jozoku Sen appeared in August 1946, barely a year after the surrender, from the Fugaku publishing house in Tokyo. Ten prints by five artists of the creative-print movement — Onchi Kōshirō, Maekawa Sempan, Sekino Jun'ichirō, Saitō Kiyoshi, and Kawanishi Hide — each contributing two designs, issued in individual mats with descriptive sheets. Onchi's pair comprised a woman stepping from a bathhouse in summer yukata, and this springtime image.

The date matters. Paper, pigment, and skilled labour were all scarce in 1946, and that a portfolio of this refinement was produced at all speaks to the determination of the hanga world to rebuild. For Onchi the moment was also personal: the portfolio appeared around the first anniversary of the death of his son, killed on military duty at twenty-three in the final months of the war. Read against that loss, this serene image of a woman gathering blossoms — the flower that in Japan stands above all others for beauty that does not last — carries a quiet elegiac undertone beneath its charm.