Shin-hanga

Shin-hanga was an art movement in early 20th-century Japan, during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, that revitalized the traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods (17th–19th century). It maintained the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system (hanmoto system) where the artist, carver, printer, and publisher engaged in division of labor, as opposed to the parallel sōsaku-hanga (creative prints) movement. The movement was initiated and nurtured by publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885–1962), and flourished from around 1915 to 1942, resuming on a smaller scale after the Second World War through the 1950s and 1960s. Watanabe approached European artists residing in Tokyo, Friedrich Capelari and Charles W. Bartlett to produce woodblock prints inspired by European Impressionism (which itself had drawn from ukiyo-e). Shin-hanga artists incorporated Western elements such as the impression of light and the expression of individual moods. It eschewed ukiyo-e traditions of emulating hand-drawn brushstrokes seeking instead to "create works replete with creativity and rich with artistic quality, by avoiding enslavement to hand-drawn painting or old models". Watanabe introduced new printing techniques, most notably in the extensive use of printed layers of either baren suji-zuri (printed marks left deliberately by the baren) or goma-zuri (printed speckles), printed on thicker and usually less moist paper than past ukiyo-e prints. Watanabe considered shin-hanga to be fine art (geijutsu) and separate from shinsaku-hanga, the term that he used to describe less labor-intensive souvenir prints such as those by Takahashi Shōtei. Shin-hanga themes, however, remained strictly traditional; themes of landscapes (fukeiga), famous places (meishō), beautiful women (bijinga), kabuki actors (yakusha-e), and birds-and-flowers (kachō-e). Primarily aimed at foreign markets, shin-hanga prints appealed to Western taste for nostalgic and romanticized views of Japan and as such, enjoyed immense popularity overseas.