Sekino Jun'ichirō • 冬日的家庭生活 • 自作版画大师之作 • 日语 - 日本 - 20世纪

Sekino Jun'ichirō 関野凖一郎 (1914–1988)

Title: Tōhoku no iroribata 東北の囲炉裏端 — "At the Hearthside in Tōhoku," catalogued in English as Home Life in Winter (Northern Japan)
Date: 1946
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), self-printed by the artist
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 the artist himself, was that the same hand should design, carve, and print the work. The movement's founding principle, championed above all by Onchi Kōshirō and carried forward by his pupils, was that a single hand should draw, carve and print the work. What you are buying is not a copy of a design: it is the object the artist actually made.
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About the Print

A young woman kneels beside a low tray, pouring out tea. The porcelain pot and three cups sit on a red lacquer stand; a smoking set and a small brazier are set out on the matting behind her. She wears a red kimono worked in chrysanthemum and shibori patterning, an unexpectedly bright note in a room otherwise built from wood, iron and paper. Behind her the shōji run the width of the sheet, their lattices caught in metallic pigment; through one panel a cold blue winter sky.

The right half of the composition belongs entirely to the irori — the sunken open hearth around which the northern farmhouse was organised. An iron kettle hangs over the coals from a jizaikagi, the height-adjustable pot-hook, and the lever that holds it in place is carved as a fish. This was not decoration for its own sake: the fish, a creature of water, was hung above the fire as a charm against it, and the form is characteristic of Tōhoku hearths. Sekino gives it the weight and dark presence of a piece of sculpture, hanging it at the exact centre of the right-hand field where a lesser designer would have put nothing at all.

The print is one of ten sheets in Nihon jozoku sen, published by Fugaku Honsha in 1946, to which Onchi Kōshirō, Maekawa Senpan, Saitō Kiyoshi, Kawanishi Hide and Sekino each contributed. Sekino supplied two designs, both northern: this hearthside interior and a girl standing among snow-buried roofs.