Biography

Ôta Masamitsu (太田雅光) (1892-1975) (known also as Ota Gakô) is a Japanese artist who did kabuki actor portraits prints in Shin-hanga style. Not much is known of his life, but he worked for the kabuki theatre as designer and book illustrator. He did a series of small prints in 1930's depicting the 18 great kabuki plays from the Ichikawa Danjuro line of actors, several caricatural actors prints and a series with Ichikawa Shinjuro III explaining the traditional kabuki make-up (Kumadori).

While this artist's signature has been most commonly read in the West as Masamitsu (noting Gako as an alternate reading), in 1966 he provided illustrations for Kabuki Costume, a reference book by the American ex-pat kabuki scholar Ruth Shaver in which he is identified on the inside flap of the book jacket as Gako Ota "artist and adviser to the Meiji Theater in Tokyo and authority on kumadori make-up."  (Notice Scholten Japanese Art - July 2023)

In the 1950's he did 24 prints in two series of actors portraits in vertical Oban* format: The first one in oban format published in 1950 is titled "Showa butai sugata" (Figures of Showa stage) and the second in dai-oban format, published in 1954 is titled "Gendai budai geika" (Figures of modern stage). Both series were carved by Ito Susumu (1916 - 1998) or Nagai Otokichi (1902-1979) and printed by Ito Shuntaro or Uchikawa Matashiro.