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- prints involved painstaking efforts which it is said were three times more labor intensive than the production of an ukiyo-e print. He would bring shin hanga prints to a new level of excellence. Yoshida travelled abroad exten�sively and captured many wonderful scenes from the U.S., Europe, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China, Korea as well as spectacular scenes of Japan. It is never mentioned, but he also must have travelled in Canada as he depicted the Niagara Falls from the Canadian side and he made a print of Moraine Lake, which is in Canada.
Watanabe also produced prints in the field of nature studies. One of his favorite artists was Koson (Shoson) Ohara (1877-1945), who also worked for other publishers. His prints were naturalistic renderings with delicate use of line and skillful shading. Most of these prints made by Koson were sent by Watanabe to Europe and America as they did not appear to have been that popular in Japan. Koson was very prolific and produced a huge number of prints using various sizes.
Just when things were going so well for Watanabe and the fledgling shin hanga movement, the Great Earthquake of 1923 hit Tokyo, burning down Watanabe's shop with the loss of his entire stock of prints and all his original woodblocks. Fortunately Watanabe was still a young energetic man of 38 and still deeply committed to the shin hanga cause. With a great deal of foreign encouragement and support, Watanabe was able to struggle back to his feet, thus assuring the survival of the movement. With this new start, he abandoned making reproductions of ukiyo-e and concentrated his entire effort on making shin hanga prints, and gradually rebuilt his export trade.
Watanabe restarted his collaboration with Shinsui and Hasui, and res�urrected his relationship with Shunsen. They were all very aware of the tastes and preferences of their foreign clientele and began producing large numbers of prints again. The Great Depression of 1929 also did not help matters as foreign demand dropped for a time.
Watanabe became one of the main suppliers of two incredibly popular and groundbreaking exhibitions of shin hanga exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1930 and 1936. Other shin hanga exhibitions went to Paris, London, Warsaw, New York and San Francisco, where they were very popular.
During the 1930s, there were few new artists working with Watanabe with the exception of Hakuho Hirano (1879-1957) and Hasui's student, Koitsu Ishiwata (1897-1987), who seemed interested in moving into the shin hanga field to take over from the aging well-known circle of shin hanga artists. In 1936 and 1937, Watanabe himself supervised the making of two prints based on photography and signed them Kako Watanabe.
10 AGGV COLLECTS/SHIN HANGA
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