Itō Shinsui (伊東深水, 1898–1972)

Condition Report

Impression & Colours

The colours are well preserved and the print presents very well.

Paper

The paper has taken on warm, even tones consistent with age.

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully – they form part of the condition description.

Suzumi – Everything She Does Not Show You

A young woman stands in profile, half turned away, in an indigo yukata scattered with morning glories. The whole design is built around what she is not showing you: the face is reduced to a single clean contour, and the eye goes instead to the nape of her neck, left bare above the collar. That exposed nape – unaji – was one of the few uncovered parts of a woman's body in traditional dress, and the most quietly charged. Shinsui puts a round uchiwa fan at her shoulder and a pale obi worked with thistles at her waist, and lets the flat blue of the cotton do the rest. It reads as heat, and as relief from it.

When Isetatsu first issued the design in June 1925, it was printed with unusual richness for the format: mica laid into the obi, blind embossing, and a grey ground printed so that the woodgrain of the block comes through. Shinsui was twenty-seven when he drew it, fourteen years after entering the studio of Kaburagi Kiyokata as a boy of thirteen.

Shinsui and Hasui for Isetatsu – A Paired Series, 1925–1927

Suzumi stands apart from the rest of Shinsui's output. Nearly all his prints were published by Watanabe Shōzaburō – by the usual count some 135 designs – against only five for Isetatsu, the old Tokyo house run by Hirose Tatsugorō, which issued them under the imprint Sōsaku Hangakai Isetatsu.

Those five belong to a small collaborative project. Between 1925 and 1927 Isetatsu published five pairs of prints, each pairing a landscape by Kawase Hasui with a beauty by Shinsui – ten works in all. It was the first time Hasui worked for any publisher other than Watanabe. Suzumi was issued as the companion to Hasui's Hama-chō Riverbank: dawn over the river at Hama-chō on one sheet, the cool of evening on the other.

Itō Shinsui – The Last Heir of the Utagawa Line

Itō Shinsui (1898–1972), born Itō Hajime in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo, left school early and went to work at the Tōkyō Insatsu printing company, where his talent was noticed. In 1911 he entered the studio of Kaburagi Kiyokata, who gave him the name Shinsui – "deep water", taken from the waters of Fukagawa. Through Kiyokata he stands at the end of a line of teachers running back through Mizuno Toshikata and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi to Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Japanese writers have called him its last heir.

In 1916 the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō saw his work and commissioned his first woodblock design, Before the Mirror (Taikyō), and Shinsui became one of the defining artists of shin-hanga – above all through his beauties, from the Twelve Images of Modern Beauties (1922–23) to the two Collection of Modern Beauties series (1929–36). In 1952 his woodblock design work was designated an Intangible Cultural Property, marked by the commemorative print Tresses, and in 1958 he became a member of the Japan Art Academy.

Collector's Note

This is a postwar impression printed from the original Isetatsu blocks, not the 1925 first issue, and is offered and priced as such. Because Isetatsu published so few Shinsui designs, Suzumi turns up far less often than his Watanabe beauties. For collectors of Hasui, it is also the other half of the Hama-chō Riverbank pairing.

Shipping: Shipped flat, protected between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, via tracked and insured post. Ships from Germany.

Guarantee: Original Japanese woodblock print, postwar impression from the Isetatsu blocks of Itō Shinsui's 1925 design. Guaranteed authentic. Full refund if not as described.

HANGA NOMAD  ·  JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINTS