• Make-up (<i>Keshō</i>- 化粧)
Make-up (<i>Keshō</i>- 化粧)
Make-up (<i>Keshō</i>- 化粧)

Torii Kotondo (鳥居言人) (artist 1900 – 1976)

Make-up (Keshō- 化粧)

Print


06/1929
12 in x 18.5 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese color woodblock print
Signed: Kotondo ga (言人画)
Seal: Kotondo
Publisher: Embossed seal of publishers Sakai and Kawaguchi in lower left margin
Dated - upper right: Shōwa yonnen rokugatsu
(6th Month of the 4th Year of Shōwa)
昭和四年六月
The Walters Art Museum
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
National Museum of Asian Art
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Clark Art Institute
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum
Nihon no hanga This print is also known as 'Applying Powder'.

There were 14 blocks with 20 superimposed printings. The carver was C. Ito. The printer was Wasakichi Komatsu.

This is number 84 of 200.

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"In 1929 the Kyoto publishers Sakai and Kawaguchi hired Torii Kotondo to design bijin prints after the style of Goyō and Shinsui. Kotondo, adopted son of Torii Kiyotada (1875-1941), seventh-generation head of the Torii school of ukiyo-e printmakers and a nihonga painter who trained under Kiyokata and alongside Shinsui, demonstrated the easy adaptability and broad popularity of shin-hanga themes and styles. His first print, Applying Makeup... took Goyō's Woman at Toilette as its model. Kotondo not only borrowed the subject of a woman applying powder to her bare shoulder but even dressed her in a nearly identical red kanoko shibori ('fawn-spot' dyed) undergarment with floral collar. The similarities are not so much plagiarism as homage: the new designer Kotondo acknowledging the greatness of the late Goyō."

Quoted from: Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan by Kendall H. Brown and Hollis Goodall-Cristante , p.63.

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The title, Keshō (化粧), is embossed in the margin below the figure of the woman.

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There are other copies of this print in the Nihon no hanga - a private museum in Amsterdam.

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Illustrated in:

1) 鳥居言人 Torii Kotondo, Gallery Beniya, 1995, p. 28, no. 19.

2) in color in The Female Image - 20th Century Japanese Prints of Japanese Beauties by Shinji Hamanaka and Amy Reigle Newland, p. 125. It also appears in a cropped form on the book's jacket.

3) Shin Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan by Kendall Brown and Hollis Goodall-Cristante, p. 20 in black and white, Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the University of Washington, 1996.

4) Ukiyo-e to Shin hanga: The Art of Japanese Woodblock Prints, Mallard Press, 1990, p. 16.

5) in color in The Women of Shin Hanga: The Judith and Joseph Barker Collection of Japanese Prints, edited by Allen Hockley, Hood Museum of Art, p. 207.

6) in color in Seven Masters: 20th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints from The Wells Collection, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2015, p. 187.

7) in black and white in The New Wave: Twentieth-century Japanese prints from the Robert O. Muller Collection, Bamboo Publishing, Ltd. and Hotei Publishing, 1993, page 198, no. 262.
modern prints (shin hanga - 新版画) (genre)
Sakai Kawaguchi (酒井川口) (publisher)
Shōwa era (昭和時代) (genre)