Shibaraku - Ueno Tadamasa - 日本木版画 - 浮世绘 - 日本 - 20世纪

Artist: Ueno Tadamasa 上野忠雅 (1904–1970), later Torii Tadamasa
Series: Kabuki Sugata-goyomi 歌舞伎姿暦 (Calendar of Kabuki Figures / Calendar of Kabuki Roles and Actors)
Sheet: November
Subject: Kamakura Goro in Shibaraku
Date: c. 1950
Format: yoko-ōban (horizontal ōban), full margins approx. 40*27 cm
Technique: mokuhanga — multi-block colour woodblock on hōsho

1. Impression and colour

A vivid, finely registered impression.

2. Paper and condition

Heavy hōsho paper with full margins. Minor foxing present.

3. The artist and the series

Ueno Tadamasa (1904–1970), born Ueno Katsumi, was the most important Kabuki print artist of the mid-twentieth century. He trained under Torii Kiyotada VII (Kiyotada IV in some numberings, 1875–1941), the head of the Torii school — the painter-printmaker lineage that had supplied Edo's Kabuki theatres with billboards and actor prints since the seventeenth century. The syllable tada in his artist name was a direct gift from his master's name, Kyotada. In 1949 the Torii family granted him the right to take their family name itself, and he became Tadamasa Torii — an extraordinary honour that confirmed him as their successor.

The Kabuki Sugata-goyomi (Calendar of Kabuki Figures) is a series of twelve sheets, one for each month of the year, each devoted to a different celebrated Kabuki role. The bold designs feature dramatically cropped compositions that focus on facial expression and hairstyle, rendered with strong calligraphic line and vivid colour, bringing the spectacular world of Kabuki to life. It is one of Tadamasa's finest series and is rarely seen complete on the market.

5. Two roads after Edo: where this print stands

In the twentieth century, woodblock prints of Kabuki took two clearly divergent paths. One road was refined, atmospheric, and deeply influenced by Western pictorial values — the tradition of Natori Shunsen and Ōta Masamitsu (Gakō), working under Watanabe Shōzaburō and other shin-hanga publishers, who treated the Kabuki actor as a psychological subject and surrounded him in soft tonal modelling and naturalistic colour.
The other road remained loyal to the bold conventions of Edo yakusha-e — flat fields, decorative pattern, exaggerated kumadori, and the theatricality of the Torii school billboard tradition. This road was led by Torii Kiyotada IV/VII and carried into the postwar decades by his pupil Ueno Tadamasa, the present artist.

Prints of this second tradition occupy a fascinating position. They are not quite ukiyo-e in the Edo sense — too modern, too synthesised, too aware of design as design. And they are not shin-hanga either — too flat, too graphic, too unwilling to soften the savage stylisation of the Kabuki stage into atmospheric mood. They stand in their own territory: expressive, declarative, almost poster-like in their graphic boldness, yet rooted in a craft tradition with three hundred years of continuous practice behind it. The Kagamijishi sheet is a textbook case — the ground is a single graded gold field, the figure is reduced to silhouette, line and pigment, and yet every line carries the weight of the Torii school's accumulated stagecraft.

It is precisely this independence from both camps — ukiyo-e and shin-hanga — that makes Tadamasa's prints so distinctive, and increasingly so as collectors come to recognise the originality of what he was doing."