Japanese Woodblock Print, 1935, self-published by Koiszumi Kishio

SIZE IN INCHES: 12.25 x 16 inches

KISHIO KOIZUMI (1893-1945) was born in Shizuoka in 1893 as the son of a former retainer of the Tokugawa family which had ruled Japan with an iron fist until the last Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu resigned in 1867. As a young man he went to Tokyo to study painting and Japanese art at the Institute of the Japan Watercolor Society. One of his informal art teachers was Ishii Hakutei. In 1928, three years after the Great Kanto earthquake, which had destroyed the old Tokyo nearly completely, Koizumi started a series One Hundred Pictures of Great Tokyo During the Showa Period - Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue. The artist finished the project 12 years later. Although the series was self-carved and self-printed, it is of a high technical standard and furthermore quite appealing. It shows landmarks of the greater Toyko area of the twenties and thirties. Many of the places and buildings depicted by Koizumi Kishio do not exist any more - destroyed in World War II or later by urban development projects in post-war Japan. Towards the end of his life, Koizumi Kishio had started another ambitious project, a series of images of Mount Fuji. The artist had planned thirty-six prints. But he could finish only twenty-three designs. When the bombing attacks of Tokyo had become more and more intensive, Koizumi Kishio was evacuated from Tokyo, became ill and died in 1945. He may not have seen the destructions personally, but he was aware that many of the sites he had depicted in Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue had ceased to exist.

VG, no flaws of note