小村雪岱デザイン大鑑

Komura Settai Design Compendium

€100 — VAT included

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Komura Settai was designing books in Tokyo in the 1910s and 20s, before the word “design” had settled into Japanese. He is best known for the covers he made for the novelist Izumi Kyoka: thin, deliberate lines and large fields of untouched paper, arranged so that the emptiness does more work than the drawing. This compendium gathers the full range — bindings, illustrations, advertisements, stage sets — and the breadth is the surprise. He brought the same hand to theatre backdrops and to soap advertisements. Settai died in 1940 and remains almost unknown outside Japan, which is strange, because his line belongs to the same decades as Art Deco and holds its own beside it. The difference is everything he chose to leave out. A heavy, well-printed volume. Japanese text throughout.