Senpan Maekawa
Senpan Maekawa was a Japanese woodblock printer associated with the sosaku hanga "creative prints" movement.
Early life
Born in Kyoto, his given name was Ishida Shigezaburō but from 1905 he went by Maekawa Senpan. He studied at the Kansai Fine Art Academy. In 1911 he moved to Tokyo and became famous as a caricaturist, working for the newspapers Yomiuri Shimbun, Kokumin shinbun, and the satirical magazine Tokyo pakku.Printmaking
Maekawa was inspired to take up woodblock printmaking by sōsaku hanga artist, Minami Kunzō. His first print was exhibited in 1919 at the Nippon Sōsaku Hanga Kyokai exhibition. In 1928 he joined with seven other sōsaku hanga artists to work on the 100 Views of New Tokyo series, to which he contributed twelve prints. From 1931 to 1960 he was an active member of the Japanese Print Association.Maekawa was largely self-taught. Although he had spent a time in his youth watching others at work and studied books that had started to be published, Maekawa admitted that for him, learning the process of printmaking was one of trial and error. He said it took him "ten years to learn technique", but that later he "got acquainted with some artisans and found they could have taught me the same things in a few hours."
In Oliver Statler's Modem Japanese Creative Prints, Maekawa remarked that, "Those of us who were making prints in those first days were doing it partly in a spirit of resistance, an urge to do something the Japanese way in the face of the new passion for oil painting." In the same book, Robert Paine, Jr. of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts said that he had "best preserved a Japanese nature, a broad humaneness of subject matter." Statler thought his "warm, human approach" to printmaking probably stemmed from his earlier career as an illustrator, and said of him: "He is one of those refreshing personalities who appears to be doing, without trumpeting, exactly what he wants to do. His work has a fresh, naive style, liberally salted with a sense of humor."