Takeji Asano

1900 - 1999

Born in Kyoto in 1900, where he studied at the Kyoto City School of Fine arts, and graduated in 1919, and the Kyoto City Specialists School of Painting in 1923. One of he is early teachers was the artist and printmaker Tsuchida Bakysen. He helped organise the Kyoto Creative ~print Society in 1929.

Asano contributed some prints to the series ‘Creative Prints of Twelve Months in new Kyoyo’ published by Uchida. Asano continued as a Shin-hanga print designer thought the 1930’s but he also developed carving and printing skills to allow him to create a series of self carved and printed landscape prints titled ‘Noted Views in the Kyoto-Osaka Area’ in 1947.

During the 1950’s Asano designed a number of landscape prints for the publisher Unsodo which became popular, and are still being reprinted today. At some time in the 1960’s, Asano ended his association with Unsodo, and as a result, Unsodo (the publisher who owned the woodblocks used to create the prints) carved off the ‘margin dates’ and artists seals from the key blocks. The two Asano prints in the Waveney Collection are examples of prints with margin dates removed - they are examples of posthumous printing, most likely some time after 2000.