Japanese Woodblock Prints 1680 - 1980

A major new survey of an internationally significant collection of Japanese woodblock prints.

This wide-ranging volume brings together over seventy five significant woodblock prints from the collection of Worcester Art Museum, spanning three hundred years, from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. Organized chronologically, it begins with rare, and in some cases unique, examples of Edo-period (1603-1868) woodblock ukiyo-e prints, many of which were sourced from the museum's seminal John Chandler Bancroft collection, donated in 1901. Encompassing a diverse range of sizes, materials, and subjects, among the renowned artists represented are Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Hiroshige.

This volume then surveys later periods and artists associated with Japanese print output during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) periods including many produced by artists working as part of the Shin-hanga "new prints" and Sōsaku-hanga "creative print" movements. The works from this time period include designs by such influential artists as Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Kamisaka Sekka, Hashiguchi Goyo, Yoshida Hiroshi, Kōshirō Onchi and Ito Shinsui.

Finally, later post-war prints featured in the catalogue, dated to the 1950's onwards, manifest the influence of a number of international art movements including Cubism, Surrealism and Popart.