Onchi Koshiro

In 1915 a young Japanese artist cut a woodblock that showed no figure and no landscape, nothing you could name, only shapes and colour. Onchi Koshiro was in his early twenties, and the print is usually counted as the first purely abstract work made in Japan, at a moment when almost no one there was working that way.

He became the driving force of what came to be called the creative-print movement, sosaku-hanga. Its principle was that a single artist should draw, carve and print a woodblock entirely by hand, against the old workshop system that split those jobs among specialists. Onchi lived by it, and worked as a book designer and poet besides, treating the print as a serious personal art rather than a craft product.

Abstraction was his instinct, with one standing exception. Portraits, he argued, had to be realistic, and in 1943 he made one of the most admired Japanese prints of the century, a grave likeness of his friend the poet Hagiwara Sakutaro, who had just died. He kept carving and printing until his own death in 1955, when his family issued a memorial edition of that portrait.