Japan art and Hagiwara Hideo: 1940s seascapes

Japan art and Hagiwara Hideo: 1940s seascapes

Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times

The Japanese artist Hagiwara Hideo (1913-2007) became firmly established by the second half of the 20th century. However, these art pieces belong to the 1940s when he suffered from severe health problems.

The British Museum says, “He was conscripted in 1943 into the army, where his health was so badly affected that he was bedridden for three years from 1945. He had lost his house, atelier and most of his early works in the May 1945 Tokyo air raids, but while sick took up the study of creative woodblock printing. In 1950 he built his atelier and in 1951 had his first one-man exhibition of oil-paintings.”

Hagiwara relocated to Korea with his family in 1921. However, he returned to Japan in 1929 to study. In the same period, he focused on oil painting under his mentor Usaburô Mimino (1891-1974).

He continued to develop his artistic skills in the early 1930s. Accordingly, in 1934 Hagiwara began to develop under the sosaku hanga specialist Minamu Kunzô.

The Portland Art Museum says, “After returning from the war, Hagiwara began to develop a figurative style that moved into abstraction by way of a poetic sense of composition and whimsical forms. Hagiwara preferred to make large prints, using an entire sheet of hanga torinoko paper. He devised numerous innovations in printmaking to recreate the texture of a drawing.”

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