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Paper short abstract

The present paper draws attention to Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920), a remarkable Japanese artist, with a focus on his woodblock prints in the ko-tanzaku format. While Gekkō tackled in his prints a variety of subjects he also utilized many different formats including the challenging narrow ko-tanzaku.

Paper long abstract

The present paper draws attention to Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920), a remarkable Japanese artist, with a focus on his colour woodblock prints in the ko-tanzaku format.

Gekkō, a central figure in the Japanese art scene during the Meiji and Taishō (1912–1926) eras, enjoyed great popularity with the public in his lifetime and was widely recognized for his talent and for his impressive oeuvre spanning illustrations for newspapers, books, and magazines to colour woodblock prints and paintings.

Much of Gekkō’s success as a print designer lay in the fact that his works covered a wide variety of genres, demonstrating his great versatility and ability to easily cater to the tastes and interests of the public at the time. In addition, not only did he embrace a variety of subjects, but he also utilized many different formats. Thus, besides the more usual ōban (approximately 38 × 25.4 cm) – sometimes used to form diptychs or triptychs – and the mid-size chūban (approximately 25.5 × 19 cm), he also explored the more atypical shikishiban (approximately 23 × 20.5 cm) and the ko-tanzaku (approximately 36 × 6 cm) formats.

By tackling the challenging long and narrow ko-tanzaku (small poem-slip) format, masterfully addressed earlier in the Edo period (1603–1868) by some of the greatest ukiyo-e artists, Ogata Gekkō distinguished himself from his contemporaries who did not work in this format.

The artist showed extraordinary creativity in designing his many vertical compositions in this demanding format, referencing a fascinating world of legendary and mythological figures and creatures, animals, depictions of beautiful women, or daily-life scenes, all infused with an abundance of Japanese symbols and motifs.

Although Ogata Gekkō himself has been acknowledged only to a limited extent, his stunning woodblock prints in the ko-tanzaku format remain underexplored in scholarship.

Keywords: Ogata Gekkō, Meiji era, woodblock print