Biographies of japanese print makers

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Biography Tokuriki, Tomikichirō (1902 - 2000)

Tomikichirô Tokuriki came from a long line of artists, the earliest a Kano school painter in the early 17th century. As he said himself (quotation from Oliver Statler's book): "Fate made me an artist, but I made myself a hanga artist".
As a young man he was trained as an artist until he graduated at the Kyoto Art College in 1923. After the Tokyo earthquake in September of that year he met a number of Tokyo artists who had moved to Kyoto. He met Hiratsuka and the group around him, and then turned all his attention to Hanga.
Throughout his career he produced two separate kinds of woodblock prints: so-called "artisan prints", mainly landscape prints produced for some Kyoto publishers (Unsōdō being the most well-known among them), and "creative prints" produced for his own pleasure. He was very active promoting sōsaku-hanga in Kyoto.
After WWII he established Matsukyū Publishing Company to produce and distribute his own prints, and Kōrokusha, a subdivision of that company, to publish self-carved, self-printed Hanga by Takahashi Tasaburō, Kamei Tōbei and himself.


Tokuriki's creative prints are much better than his bread-and-butter prints. The former have easily withstood the passage of time, whereas of his other (commercially produced) landscape prints only the more daring designs still stand out.
But Tokuriki was a cautious man, who next to his commercial print activities also had a shop selling tea.
Items for sale from Tokuriki, Tomikichirō


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