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- show beauties against a plain background. He tried to update his images of beauties, often with a playful hint of eroticism. For example in his print entitled Tipsy, his subject holds a cigarette over a cocktail. His subjects had both traditional and up-to-date hairdos.
Hakuho Hirano (1879-1957), a self-taught Nihonga artist, designed prints for Watanabe in the mid 1930s. The faces of his subject were seldom seen as he liked to portray women with their backs or sides to the viewer. Little is known of him.
Other notable shin hanga artists depicting beauties include Shuho Yamakawa (1898-1944), another of Kiyokata's outstanding students, who produced prints of elegant women with elaborate hairstyles, often on a mica background for Watanabe in the 1920s and 1930s, and Shima Seien (1893-1970), an accomplished woman artist, produced a small number of very impressive bijin-eprints, showing great attention to facial features. The latter was married to a bank employee and lived in various places in Japan and abroad.
Yakusha-e (Actor Prints)
The most prolific of the shin hanga artists who made Kabuki actor prints were Shunsen Natori (1886-1960) and Koka (Toyonari) Yamamura (1885-1942).
Shunsen studied with a number of Japanese-style painters. In 1916 he was approached by Watanabe to convert his actor paintings into woodblock prints. His prints were obviously inspired by the greatest ukiyo-e actor printmaker, Sharaku, but his genius in updating the genre was stunning. After their initial collaborations, Watanabe and Shunsen would not work with each other again until eight years later, when they would start a long and profitable relationship. Between 1925 and 1929, Watanabe produced thirty-six of Shunsen's actor prints. These prints established him as one of the greatest artists of the genre and he went on to receive numerous interna�tional awards. After World War II, he continued to produce a large number of exciting actor prints in collaboration with Watanabe. Tragically in 1958 his beloved twenty-two-year-old daughter, Yoshiko, died of pneumonia, and he never recovered emotionally. On March 30, i960, he and his second wife committed double suicide at the family grave in Tokyo.
Koka Yamamura (1865-1942), the other renowned designer of actor prints, originally studied with the great ukiyo-e artist, Gekko Ogata, before he went on to design a fairly large number of actor prints for Watanabe, starting in 1920. Koka's prints were very dynamic and powerful, but he also produced some comical caricatures of the actors. He was also fond of portraying the actors in profile. At first his prints were released in small editions of 150, but then they got much larger.
28 AGGV COLLECTS/SHIN HANGA
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