Tsakeji Asano
Asano Takeji was born in 1900 in Kyoto where he studied arts and crafts at the Kyoto School of painting with Tomikichiro Tokuriki. Among his early teachers was the artist and printmaker Tsuchida Bakusen. Asano helped to organize the Kyoto Creative Print Society (Kyoto Sosaku-Hanga Kyoka) in 1929. He became an active member of the sosaku hanga group in Kyoto. He expanded his skills in print design as well as learning the skills of carving and printing which enabled him to create some self-carved and self-printed series of landscape prints. His main fame came in the 1950s and many of his works have been published by Unsodo. His favorite subject was landscapes.
Asano became friends with the American artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969), during Shahn’s visit to Japan in 1964, and continued that friendship until Shahn’s death. Shahn produced art in many mediums including woodblock prints. Purportedly, each artist had some influence on the other.
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