Japanese Lithograph Print, 1919, 1st/only edition, signed and dated in pencil bottom margin, edition of 50 self-drawn and self-printed by Oda Kazuma

SIZE IN INCHES: dai-oban, 13.25 x 19.25 inches

COMMENTS: Extremely rare litho by Oda Kazuma, this is the only example we've ever come across

ODA KAZUMA (1882-1956) was born in Tokyo into a family with shogunal roots. He studied Western-style painting with Kawamura Kiyo-o (1852-1934). Starting around 1898, he learned lithography from his elder brother Oda Tôu (a painter and lithography printer in Osaka) as well as with Kaneko Masajirô (active 1884-early 1900s). In 1903 Oda worked as a designer at the Koshiba lithography studio in Tokyo. Around that time, or shortly before, he appears to have met the Prague-born painter and printmaker Emil Orlik (1870-1932), whose lithographic prints were an inspiration. A prolific artist, the vast majority of Oda's oeuvre was in the medium of self-printed lithography, but he did provide designs for six shin-hanga-style ("new prints" or neo-ukiyo-e) woodblock prints issued by the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo in 1924, whose studio artisans originally made 100 impressions of each work (and 300 for the Matsue Ohashi design). Oda's self-published sosaku hanga, however, were almost always printed in smaller editions (often 20 each, sometimes 50).

Impressions of Oda's prints are in many private collections and public institutions. Among the collections worldwide are the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Cincinnati Art Museum; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Honolulu Art Museum, Hawai'i; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Toledo Museum of Art, OH.

VG, with flaws as shown