| Born | 1866 (Kyōto) |
| Died | 1942 (Kyōto) |
| Nationality | Japan |
| Epochs | Asian Art |
| Genre | Malerei, Nihonga |
| Profession | Designer, Maler, Künstler |
| Student | Furuya Kōrin |
| Notable works | Flowers of the Four Seasons (1925), Longevity Dance, Manzai Comedy at the Imperial Palace, Maid of Ōhara, Pine and Plum Blossoms, Manzai Comedy, one of three panels, Folding Fan with Fushimi Doll |
| Museums | Cleveland Museum of Art |
Consider the mountain first. The print “Mount Fuji, from Momoyo-gusa” from 1909 - the subtitle names the album to which the print belongs - shows a white cone against a golden-yellow ground, with several bands of blue shadow along its flank - no sky, no cloud, no pilgrim. The summit is cropped as tightly as a photograph, and the few areas of color are placed as confidently as a trademark. Anyone who designs like this thinks as a designer. Its creator was Kamisaka Sekka, whose civil name was Kamisaka Yoshitaka, a Japanese painter and designer born in Kyoto in 1866. He is considered the last great master of the Rinpa tradition - the decorative Kyoto art movement founded in the early 17th century by Hon'ami Koetsu and Tawaraya Sotatsu and refined by Ogata Korin.
His path to such confidence in design began in Kyoto's Awata district, in a samurai family that recognized the boy's talent early. At sixteen he became a pupil of the Shijo painter Suzuki Zuigen - the Shijo school cultivated a naturalistic Kyoto style of painting - and around 1888 he moved on to Kishi Kokei, an artist and designer at the imperial court who introduced him to the decorative arts. The diplomat Shinagawa Yajiro acquainted him with European decorative art and encouraged him to pursue design; in 1895 Sekka won second prize for the design of an incense burner, and in 1899 the city of Kyoto appointed him as its technical adviser.
The decisive journey followed in 1901. The Japanese government sent the thirty-five-year-old to the International Exhibition in Glasgow, and the assignment deserves attention - Sekka was to investigate what the West found so appealing about Japanese art. In Scotland he encountered Art Nouveau, a European movement that had itself long drawn upon Japanese aesthetics. In the West, the Kyoto designer was therefore studying a fashion whose sources lay in his homeland. After returning, he drew the conclusion to which he remained faithful throughout his life - he renewed his own Rinpa heritage with modern means and left the foreign visual language where he had found it.
He demonstrated this in printed works issued by the Kyoto publisher Unsodo. In 1903 the three-volume pattern album Chigusa appeared, delivered by subscription in sets of three prints, with shimmering mica powder and embossing. “Birds at sunset on the lake” was also created in 1903. Two long-legged birds stand on a silvery spit of shore, behind them the evening sky burns orange-red, and the sun hangs as a striped golden disc above waves hatched in gold. His major work followed in 1909 and 1910 with the album Momoyogusa, the “Flowers of a Hundred Worlds”: three volumes containing sixty double-page color woodblock prints, printed with ink, color, gold and silver, initially delivered sheet by sheet to subscribers and later reissued in bound form for a wider audience. In the preface, the Kyoto physician Sugawa Nobuyuki has the flowers bloom in the “spirit of the new age”; the album presented itself as a manifesto of modernity from the ancient imperial city. Among its boldest prints is “Swirling Snow” - a figure hunches through the storm beneath a cream-colored conical hat and black cloak, with only the feet and a staff remaining visible as white flecks of snow drift across a gray ground that gleams with gold in places. The delicate counterpoint is provided by “Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Willow and Cherry” - green veils of willow descend in long arcs over a flowering cherry branch, while the warm tone of the paper assumes the role of light.
The designer worked across media - lacquer, textiles, ceramics, interiors. Many of his designs were executed by his younger brother Kamisaka Yukichi, a master of lacquer; one drew the design, the other completed it. From 1905 Sekka taught at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1907 he founded his own decorative arts society in Kyoto. In 1915, on the 200th anniversary of Ogata Korin's death, he designed the cover of the catalogue for the commemorative exhibition, a pine pattern in the style of the master he revered, printed with mica powder - the last Rinpa master bowed to his forebear. In 1938 he was appointed to the council of the Kyoto Art Museum, and in 1942 he died in the city of his birth. His work then fell from view for around six decades, until the first comprehensive retrospective opened in Kyoto in 2003 before traveling to Los Angeles and Birmingham, Alabama; in 2012 the Metropolitan Museum in New York allowed visitors to leaf digitally through Sekka's printed books, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney presented him in a dedicated exhibition as a pioneer of modern Japanese design.
At Meisterdrucke, Sekka therefore hangs side by side with the classics of Japanese woodblock printing, with Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. In art-historical terms, this is a fascinating juxtaposition, for the two older artists belonged to Ukiyo-e, the popular pictorial world of the Edo period, while Sekka continued Kyoto's decorative Rinpa lineage - two different traditions linked by the same process, the carved woodblock and the patient printing of one color after another. Seen in this light, the juxtaposition presents Sekka as the youngest member of a great family of printmakers, one who taught the old technique the visual language of the twentieth century.
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| Born | 1866 (Kyōto) |
| Died | 1942 (Kyōto) |
| Nationality | Japan |
| Epochs | Asian Art |
| Genre | Malerei, Nihonga |
| Profession | Designer, Maler, Künstler |
| Student | Furuya Kōrin |
| Notable works | Flowers of the Four Seasons (1925), Longevity Dance, Manzai Comedy at the Imperial Palace, Maid of Ōhara, Pine and Plum Blossoms, Manzai Comedy, one of three panels, Folding Fan with Fushimi Doll |
| Museums | Cleveland Museum of Art |
Consider the mountain first. The print “Mount Fuji, from Momoyo-gusa” from 1909 - the subtitle names the album to which the print belongs - shows a white cone against a golden-yellow ground, with several bands of blue shadow along its flank - no sky, no cloud, no pilgrim. The summit is cropped as tightly as a photograph, and the few areas of color are placed as confidently as a trademark. Anyone who designs like this thinks as a designer. Its creator was Kamisaka Sekka, whose civil name was Kamisaka Yoshitaka, a Japanese painter and designer born in Kyoto in 1866. He is considered the last great master of the Rinpa tradition - the decorative Kyoto art movement founded in the early 17th century by Hon'ami Koetsu and Tawaraya Sotatsu and refined by Ogata Korin.
His path to such confidence in design began in Kyoto's Awata district, in a samurai family that recognized the boy's talent early. At sixteen he became a pupil of the Shijo painter Suzuki Zuigen - the Shijo school cultivated a naturalistic Kyoto style of painting - and around 1888 he moved on to Kishi Kokei, an artist and designer at the imperial court who introduced him to the decorative arts. The diplomat Shinagawa Yajiro acquainted him with European decorative art and encouraged him to pursue design; in 1895 Sekka won second prize for the design of an incense burner, and in 1899 the city of Kyoto appointed him as its technical adviser.
The decisive journey followed in 1901. The Japanese government sent the thirty-five-year-old to the International Exhibition in Glasgow, and the assignment deserves attention - Sekka was to investigate what the West found so appealing about Japanese art. In Scotland he encountered Art Nouveau, a European movement that had itself long drawn upon Japanese aesthetics. In the West, the Kyoto designer was therefore studying a fashion whose sources lay in his homeland. After returning, he drew the conclusion to which he remained faithful throughout his life - he renewed his own Rinpa heritage with modern means and left the foreign visual language where he had found it.
He demonstrated this in printed works issued by the Kyoto publisher Unsodo. In 1903 the three-volume pattern album Chigusa appeared, delivered by subscription in sets of three prints, with shimmering mica powder and embossing. “Birds at sunset on the lake” was also created in 1903. Two long-legged birds stand on a silvery spit of shore, behind them the evening sky burns orange-red, and the sun hangs as a striped golden disc above waves hatched in gold. His major work followed in 1909 and 1910 with the album Momoyogusa, the “Flowers of a Hundred Worlds”: three volumes containing sixty double-page color woodblock prints, printed with ink, color, gold and silver, initially delivered sheet by sheet to subscribers and later reissued in bound form for a wider audience. In the preface, the Kyoto physician Sugawa Nobuyuki has the flowers bloom in the “spirit of the new age”; the album presented itself as a manifesto of modernity from the ancient imperial city. Among its boldest prints is “Swirling Snow” - a figure hunches through the storm beneath a cream-colored conical hat and black cloak, with only the feet and a staff remaining visible as white flecks of snow drift across a gray ground that gleams with gold in places. The delicate counterpoint is provided by “Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Willow and Cherry” - green veils of willow descend in long arcs over a flowering cherry branch, while the warm tone of the paper assumes the role of light.
The designer worked across media - lacquer, textiles, ceramics, interiors. Many of his designs were executed by his younger brother Kamisaka Yukichi, a master of lacquer; one drew the design, the other completed it. From 1905 Sekka taught at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1907 he founded his own decorative arts society in Kyoto. In 1915, on the 200th anniversary of Ogata Korin's death, he designed the cover of the catalogue for the commemorative exhibition, a pine pattern in the style of the master he revered, printed with mica powder - the last Rinpa master bowed to his forebear. In 1938 he was appointed to the council of the Kyoto Art Museum, and in 1942 he died in the city of his birth. His work then fell from view for around six decades, until the first comprehensive retrospective opened in Kyoto in 2003 before traveling to Los Angeles and Birmingham, Alabama; in 2012 the Metropolitan Museum in New York allowed visitors to leaf digitally through Sekka's printed books, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney presented him in a dedicated exhibition as a pioneer of modern Japanese design.
At Meisterdrucke, Sekka therefore hangs side by side with the classics of Japanese woodblock printing, with Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. In art-historical terms, this is a fascinating juxtaposition, for the two older artists belonged to Ukiyo-e, the popular pictorial world of the Edo period, while Sekka continued Kyoto's decorative Rinpa lineage - two different traditions linked by the same process, the carved woodblock and the patient printing of one color after another. Seen in this light, the juxtaposition presents Sekka as the youngest member of a great family of printmakers, one who taught the old technique the visual language of the twentieth century.