Twilight in the Village, Nara
by Asano Takeji

	Artist:	Asano Takeji — 浅野竹二
	Title:	Twilight in the Village, Nara
	Series:
	Date of first edition?:	1953
	Publisher (first edition)?:	Unsodo — 芸艸堂
	Publisher (this edition)?:	Unsodo — 芸艸堂
	Medium (first edition):	Woodblock
	Medium (this edition):	Woodblock
	Format (first edition):	Oban
	Format (this edition):	Oban
	DB artwork code:	30238
	Notes (first edition)?:
	Notes (this edition)?:	The following information was taken from the original web listing of this artwork. Note that there may be some inaccuracies: Twilight in the Village, Nara by Takeji Asano. Genuine woodblock print. Oban size measures 10.8 x 16.0 inches. Fine condition. Unsodo publisher's seal, Shinmi printer's seal and Okura carver's seal in right margin. Takeji ga characters in lower right corner. Gei watermark and Japanese title in left margin. Not dated.
	Artist Bio:	Asano Takeji was born in Kyoto in 1900 and studied art in his youth. He graduated from the Kyoto City School of Fine Arts in 1919 and subsequently from the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting in 1923. One of his early teachers was the artist and printmaker Tsuchida Bakusen, with whom he studied Japanese-style painting. Asano helped to organise the Kyoto Creative Print Society (Kyoto Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai) in 1929. In 1930, Asano contributed several designs to a series of prints titled "Creative Prints of Twelve Months in new Kyoto" (Sosaku-hanga shin Kyoto junikagetsu). These prints were published by Uchida. The other artists contributing to this series were Benji Asada and Tomikichiro Tokuriki, also members of the Kyoto Creative Print Society. Asano's work as a shin hanga print designer continued throughout the 1930's, but along the way he learned the skills of carving and printing. This enabled him to create his own self-carved and self-printed series of landscape prints titled "Noted Views in the Kyoto-Osaka Area" (Kinki meisho fukei) in 1947. During the 1950's, Asano designed numerous landscape prints for the publisher Unsodo. These popular landscape prints are still being reprinted today. Original Unsodo prints have the Japanese date printed in the margin, while the modern reprints lack the date. Inspired by the encouragement of the Lithuanian-American social realism artist Ben Shahn, who once visited him in his studio and remained his friend, Asano established a freer artistic style often featuring animals in bold colours, later in his career. Asano continued to work as a printmaker during the 1970's and 80's. These late prints were simple and often humorous, signed with the letters T.A. and the date. This information has been excerpted from various web sources and from Merritt and Yamada's Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900-1975. 浅野 竹二（あさの たけじ、明治33年（1900年）10月24日-平成10年（1998年）2月10日） 京都の日本画家、版画家。京都市立絵画専門学校で日本画を専攻、途中油絵に手をそめましたが、再び日本画に復帰、土田麦僊の率いる「山南塾」に入塾し、国画創作協会展に出品するなど日本画家として活躍しました。