Ode to Autumn Pattern: Kawanishi Hide

One of the traditions of Japanese art through the ages has been documenting the seasons and months of the year in art. My particular favorites are representations of autumn (it’s only a week away) in landscapes, still life, and particular objects associated with the season.

Kawanishi Hide (1894–1965, Japan), Autumnal Glory, ca. 1950s. Color woodcut print on paper, 25 ⅞" x 20" (65.7 x 50.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist. (MOMA-P0139).

Hide Kawanishi's work is exceptional among sōsaku hanga (“creative print,” the artist as sole creator) art for its jarring color. Unlike many sōsaku hanga artists, he used poster paints, which tend to have more vibrant colors. Kawanishi's colors are rarely, if ever, modulated. The artist achieved softened contours on his floral forms using a rounded chisel, rather than a knife, to carve out the forms of his compositions. He never mixed the poster colors, his forms were never outlined, and he treated black like “just another color.” Kawanishi created many still-life subjects, many in the more Western format of flowers in a vase. In all of his floral works, he reduced forms of the flowers to flattened color shapes.

The art form of the multiple-block woodcut print flourished in Japan during the Edo Period (1615–1868). It is primarily known in the West in the ukiyo-e style, prints that showed city life and familiar landscapes as representations of the transient physical world. The style persisted after the Edo Period.

Sōsaku hanga and shin hanga (“new print,” which followed traditional collaboration between artist, woodblock carver, and printer) were movements that had origins in Japan as a reaction the turn-of-the-1900s debate in Japanese artistic and literary circles about expressions of “self.” This was in part influenced by the Japanese exposure to European modernism: many Japanese artists travelled to Europe during the 1890s. Another factor was the reaction by young artists to the establishment in 1907 of the Japan Fine Arts Academy, which looked upon printmaking as a “minor art.”  By 1927, many Japanese artists were experimenting with modernism. Only after World War II (1939–1945) did Japanese modernist prints gain worldwide recognition, thanks in some part to American patronage of works that reflected Western abstraction, a perception of the blending of East and West.

Kawanishi was born in Kobe, Japan, where he lived and worked all of his life. His family owned a private post office, of which Kawanishi eventually assumed management. However, he had aspired to be an artist since his youth. He studied art in a correspondence course from Tokyo, driven by an inclination for the sōsaku hanga artists. Those artists, who drew studies, carved the woodblock, and printed the composition, were largely self-taught in woodblock printing.

Correlations to Davis programs: Explorations in Art Kindergarten 2E: 6.1; Explorations in Art 2E Grade 1: 1.2, 4.2; Explorations in Art 2E Grade 2: 1.2, 1.4; A Community Connection 2E: 5.4 studio time; A Global Pursuit 2E: 7.1 studio time, 7.2 studio time, 7.3; A Personal Journey 2E: 5.2 studio time; Experience Art: 4.2