KŌSHIRŌ ONCHI • After the Bath • Sōsaku Hanga Masterpiece • Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - 20th century

KŌSHIRŌ ONCHI (1891–1955)

Title: After the Bath (湯上り, Yuagari)
Series: Eight Figures of Contemporary Women (今代婦人八態, Kindai Fujin Hattai)
Date: Spring 1934
Publisher: Sōsaku Hanga Kurabu (Nakajima Jūtarō)
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), self-printed by the artist
Period: Sōsaku Hanga
Format: Approx. 20 × 26 cm
Condition: Excellent!
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Why Sōsaku Hanga Deserves Your Attention

Sōsaku Hanga — the Japanese creative-print movement — remains one of the most undervalued areas of twentieth-century art. These are not commercial reproductions produced across a divided workshop of publisher, carver, and printer: the movement's founding principle, championed above all by Onchi himself, was that the same hand should design, carve, and print the work. This particular sheet was printed by Onchi's own hand — a direct, physical link to the artist rarely found in the earlier ukiyo-e tradition, where design and execution were always separated across specialists.
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About the Print — A Modern Woman, Framed by Signage

A woman steps out from the public bath, wash-bowl and cloth still in hand, her kimono patterned with bold blue leaves against a deep indigo ground. Behind her looms the red-tipped triangular sign flag traditionally hung outside a Japanese neighborhood bathhouse, and the surrounding characters — 春 ("haru," spring) and 湯 ("yu," hot water/bath) — read as the bathhouse's own signage, anchoring the scene in a specific, everyday urban ritual of 1930s Tokyo rather than an idealized or timeless setting. The flattened color planes, graphic silhouette, and integration of text directly into the composition are hallmarks of Onchi's design sensibility, carrying the poster-like clarity of his book-cover and magazine work into the print medium itself.
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About the Artist — The Father of Sōsaku Hanga

Kōshirō Onchi is the central figure of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking — the artist most responsible for establishing sōsaku hanga, the "creative print" movement, as a serious art form independent of the old collaborative ukiyo-e workshop system, in which a single publisher coordinated separate designers, carvers, and printers. Onchi insisted instead that the artist should design, carve, and print his own work, treating the print as a direct and personal act of creation rather than a reproductive craft. Trained in Western-style oil painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he drew on Kandinsky and Munch to pursue abstraction in Japan decades before it was widely accepted here, while also working prolifically as a book designer, poet, and photographer. He founded and led Ichimokukai, the printmakers' study group that shaped a generation of sōsaku hanga artists including Sekino Jun'ichirō and Azechi Umetarō. This particular design was self-printed by Onchi himself, published in spring 1934 by the Sōsaku Hanga Kurabu — a rare, direct link between the artist's hand and the sheet you are looking at. The Honolulu Museum of Art, which holds the largest public Onchi collection outside Japan, mounted a major retrospective of his work in 2025–26 marking the seventieth anniversary of his death.
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