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Edutainment > Articles on Art > Shin Hanga > Ito Takashi - 1894-1982

Ito Takashi

Takegawa River at Dawn

Ito Takashi worked primarily as a painter. But he also created several dozens of landscape prints in Shin hanga style for Shozaburo Watanabe. His landscapes are idealized scenes of beauty and untouched nature.

Student of Kiyokata Kaburagi

Ito Takashi was born in 1894 in Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. He studied art at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and became a student at the private school of Kiyokata Kaburagi. Kaburagi was the master of nihonga, painting in traditional Japanese style.

Kaburagi knew the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo well and his painting class developed into something like a "talent pool" for Watanabe who was permanently looking for excellent young artists who wanted to work for him.

Beautiful Landscapes

Ito Takashi

Kokuritsu Koen Towada-ko no uchi
Lake Towada-ko National Park

Thus Takashi became one of the artists working for Watanabe. He made about 50 landscape prints for the publisher in the 1920s (with the first in 1922) and the 1930s and also after the war. Watanabe considered Takashi Ito as one of his "upper league" designers like Kawase Hasui or Ito Shinsui. Their works were mostly published in Oban or larger formats.

The landscape prints by Takashi remind a bit of German 19th century paintings and prints - romantic, very romantic. Like Kawase Hasui, also Ito shows seldom more than one person in his designs. This creates an eerie and sentimental mood when contemplating a Takashi print - man alone in nature! The effect had first been used by German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

The style in which Takashi Ito prints were created looks more like brush stroke paintings than typical Japanese woodblock prints. The prints have a lot of color graduation instead of plain even color areas that are so typical for classical Japanese ukiyo-e. It required highly skilled carvers and printers to produce Takashi Ito prints.

Literature sources used for this Ito Takashi biography

• Helen Merritt and Nanako Yamada, "Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900-1975", published by University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, ISBN 0-8248-1732-X

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