All Exhibitions

The Print Generation

An abstract print of geometric color fields—purple, blue, gray, and white—with a dark, irregular line bifurcating the image and a black-and-white eye in the upper right quadrant.

Dates

November 16, 2024–April 27, 2025
Location

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 25
Collection Area

Japanese Art

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of print artists broke from existing traditions in Japanese printmaking. While the labor of print production was historically divided among different craftspeople, these ambitious artists sought to reinvent the medium by undertaking all aspects of a work’s creation—designing, carving, and printing—themselves. This new approach to printmaking became known as the sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement, and the resulting artworks are often rough, raw, and unique to each artist’s developing techniques and abilities. Some of the most active practitioners of this new style joined the Ichimokukai, or “First Thursday Society,” organized by Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955), whose members met on the first Thursday of every month from 1939 until Onchi’s death.

Living through imperialist expansion, wartime scarcity, and foreign occupation, these artists sought international recognition for works that captured their individualism and self-expression amid a changing world. The Print Generation presents a selection of creative prints that challenged the dominant narrative of what it meant to be an artist in twentieth-century Japan. Highlights from the Kenneth and Kiyo Hitch Collection and the Gerhard Pulverer Collection illustrate the development and evolution of the sōsaku hanga movement as well as the international reach of these artists and the depth of their relationships to each other.

Reading Japanese Prints: Modern to Contemporary

View high resolution Japanese prints in our digital interactive. Explore by theme, including materiality, gender, and abstraction. Additional resources include artist biographies, a glossary, and bibliographies of key texts.

Browse Prints

The World of the Japanese Book: The Gerhard Pulverer Collection

Author List: Ann Yonemura, et al.
Publisher: Freer|Sackler
Publication Date: 2014

The Pulverer Collection, acquired in its entirety by the Freer Gallery of Art in 2007, includes numerous rare and pristine examples of Japanese illustrated books produced in the Edo period and beyond. For more than thirty years Dr. Gerhard Pulverer, a renowned medical researcher in Germany, and his wife Rosemarie traveled the world and assembled the collection. Their holdings of more than 900 titles encompass almost 2,200 volumes that range in date from the early seventeenth century to the 1970s. Today the Pulverer Collection is regarded as one of the most outstanding and comprehensive collections of Japanese illustrated books outside Japan. This online publication makes this extraordinary collection accessible from anywhere.