Tadao Harumura

Japanese Tadao Harumura lived in the port town of Kobe in Japan and was one of the leading woodcut artists there before World War II. The focus of his woodblock prints was on landscapes and nudes. Harumura was born as Tadao Tanabe close to the picturesque Kujūkuri Beach on the east coast of Honshu Island. After finishing high school, he enrolled at the Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya close to Kobe, where he met printmaker Imazō Kitamura and started producing prints. His first exhibitions came in 1922 with the Japanese Creative Prints Association and he became a regular participant in their exhibitions. In the same year, he dropped out of university. Between 1927 and 1931 he published a first series of collections of woodcuts dealing, for instance, with the architecture of the city of Kobe (Kobe landscape) or with nude drawings (Spring), which played a significant role in the history of creative printmaking. With Hide Kawanishi and Imazō Kitamura, Harumura founded the artist association Sanko-kai in 1929 and illustrated stories in popular magazines. In 1936 he donated a considerable number of his works, including the two prints shown at the 1936 Berlin art competition, to the Kobe City Central Library.

While working in a liver oil factory in 1938, Harumura sustained a serious injury that forced him to abandon printmaking. During an air raid on Kobe in 1945 all of his works, woodblocks, and all other materials were destroyed, and he never recovered as an artist. While he worked in a munition factory in Osaka, his family was evacuated to Kuwana near Nagoya. After the end of the war, they all returned to his hometown of Shirako, where he started working in the village office. He later worked for the local welfare division as a pension clerk and eventually in a school canteen.

Harumura donated his two submitted works along with others to the Kobe Central Library in 1936. Aisuhokkē (sen) (Ice Hockey (Fight)) was a color woodblock print measuring 29 x 35 cm, created in 1935/36. Sukētingu (Skating) was printed in 1936, the year of the Olympic Games, in black and white.