Hokusai’s Landscapes

[Image: Hokusai, Fine Wind, Clear Weather (1830), colour woodblock print on paper.]

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is the most famous figure in Japanese art. He worked in the medium of colour-woodblock printing. Best known for his landscapes, he found fame in Japan for his published manga in 1815-9. Posthumously, he achieved legendary status in Europe and proved very influential among the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

Hokusai’s Landscapes collects the best of Hokusai’s landscapes. Author Sarah E. Thompson (curator of Japanese art, Museum of Fine Art, Boston) makes an informed guide to Hokusai’s art and its reception. The print impressions illustrated are those in the MFA collection. Generally, these are good quality and in reasonable condition.

Prints of the ukiyo-e generally did not focus upon landscape, as many were urban or domestic in character. They featured prominently in pilgrimage pictures. Hokusai’s innovation was to produce art in the style of ukiyo-e but take these scenes out of the rooms and streets of Edo. He integrated figures into his landscape prints for their narrative function, to indicate scale and to provide animation, relief and so forth.

Hokusai designed his prints during the heyday of ukiyo-e colour prints. Print designers drew their designs on paper that was pasted to blocks, subsequently cut away by a specialist cutter, destroying the drawing and leaving the design on the block. Other blocks for colour were added, as indicated by the designer. The specialisation of designer, cutter, printer, papermaker and publisher/seller made high production of colour printmaking a viable business, something that never developed widely in Europe. (The closest European artists came to this is the chiaroscuro woodcut.)

Hokusai produced his landscape prints over a short period (1830-6). It is thought that Hokusai retired from print designing in 1836 due to an economic crash, which depressed the market for prints made for the merchant class. He subsequently devoted himself to painting, working for wealthy patrons, although he apparently ended his days in straitened circumstances.

Among the prints included are those of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830), One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834), Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (1834), One Hundred Poems (1835) and others. Dating of Hokusai prints depends upon external information, such as notices in publications advertising new print series, placed by the publisher.

The introduction of cobalt/Prussian blue expanded the palette available to Japanese artists. Previous blue pigments were smalt (dull, liable to discolour), indigo (not a true blue, liable to fading) and ultramarine (brilliant but expensive) and other imperfect alternatives. Access to a strong, affordable and non-fugitive blue made landscape prints (with their expanses of sky and sea) a new area for previously urban ukiyo-e prints.

View of sea and mountains are suffused with graduated Prussian blue. Aspects of everyday life are woven into many landscapes. Work, leisure, farming, fishing, eating, pilgrimage, travel and play are all set in the varied landscape around Mount Fuji. In one print a roof is being tiled by roofers in the foreground, mist shrouds the town below; above the mist a kite is flying. In another scene, a fisherman stands on the apex of an arcing coastal rock; he grips leashes of trained cormorants which are submerged in tumultuous waves. The shape of rock, man and leashes echoes the contours of Mount Fuji. There is the iconic composition of travellers on a path through a marsh caught by a gust of wind. This features the motif of figures with their heads completely concealed by circular hats, one commonly used by Hokusai.

[Image: Hokusai, The Great Wave (1830), colour woodblock print on paper.]

The Great Wave is included. It has prompted numerous interpretations, not least that of mortality of man. Three versions of Fine Wind, Clear Weather (showing Mount Fuji in profile) are reproduced. Each is differently coloured, showing the inventive inking of printers.

Falling Mist Waterfall at Mount Kurokami in Shimotsuke Province is the epitome of Hokusai’s ability to synthesise Japanese and Western styles and abstraction in depictions based on observation. The artificial pattern of the parabolas of falling water satisfies our aesthetic requirements and yet does not contravene our understanding of nature. Even more daring is Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kiso Road, in which the waterfall descends from a near-complete circular aperture. Hokusai used pure geometric forms, along with curvilinear line and strong diagonal axes. The print is influenced by the Rinpa style, with its stylised depiction of flowing water.

The depictions of bridges have become archetypes of Japanese architecture within nature. The print of poet Li Bai (Li Po) gazing into a waterfall has the falling water as a curtain of parallel vertical abstract bands.

[Image: (left) Hokusai, Falling Mist Waterfall at Mount Kurokami in Shimotsuke Province (1832), colour woodblock print on paper. (right) Hokusai, Kajikazawa in Kai Province (1830), colour woodblock print on paper.]

Thompson outlines putative influence upon Hokusai of art by Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795) and Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818), both artists who adopted aspects of Western art (respectively, colour and tonal complexity in non-linear forms and one-point perspective). What made Hokusai so appealing to European artists was – paradoxically – his Western-inflected version of Kano School art, which his European admirers found so quintessentially Japanese. Japan Bridge in Edo combines Western one-point perspective with Japanese aerial perspective.

A long essay surveying Hokusai’s landscapes is followed by large illustrations with brief informative captions. The printing, paper quality and two-colour cloth binding are good. Overall, Hokusai’s Landscapes makes an excellent introduction to one of the great artists

 

Sarah E. Thompson, Hokusai’s Landscapes: The Complete Series, Museum of Fine Art, Boston (distr. Artbook/Thames & Hudson), 2019, cloth hardback, 216pp, col. illus., £35, ISBN 978 0 87846 866 9

 

© 2020 Alexander Adams

To view my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

History of Art in Japan

[Image: Unkei, Asanga (1212), carved and painted wood. Source: Wikimedia]

The scope of this volume is extensive. The author intends to outline the main features, persistent ideas and developments in Japanese fine arts, crafts and architecture from pre-history to today. Tsuji outlines the development of Japan’s culture through artefacts from its early eras of Jōmon, Yayoi, Kofun, Nara, Heian and Medieval. The subsequent Edo and Modern periods are much more familiar to non-Japanese readers and these are covered in more detail because of the complexity and large amount of documentation and artefacts from this time.

The cord patterning and stippling in winding linear layouts of the pot decoration in the Jōmon period (9300-500 BCE) can be seen as forerunners of Japanese fine art of our day, such as that by Minoru Onoda. Prefigured Modernism abounds in Japanese art. “[…] another dogū [freestanding ceramic figurines], discovered in 1992 at the Nishinomae site in Yamagata prefecture and designated as a National Treasure in 2012, whose legs suggest that the figure is wearing pants; the sharp drop along the back recalls the forms of sculptor Ossip Zadkine.” Debates continue about the relative levels immigration from Korea in the Yayoi period; what is not in dispute was the importance of their visual culture.

According to tradition, in 522 Buddhism arrived in Japan from China and in 538 it began to be incorporated into the imperial court. In the following centuries, carvings of the Buddha were fusions of indigenous Japanese culture and imported Korean and Chinese statuary. These were made from stone or wood, often gilded or intricately painted with paint and lacquer. Later statues showed sophisticated manipulation of pattern, emphatic volume, simplified forms and drapery, even with the loss of polychromy. Buddhist temples became more sophisticated and the Izumo-taisha (Izumo grand shrine) was constructed on giant pillars that may have been as tall as 100 metres, reached by a long straight staircase. The use of wood and paper in architecture has meant that early structures have been lost and rebuilt. At this time shōgon (sacred ornament) became a major strand in craft production. Tsuji explains the theological basis for the statues, mandalas and narrative paintings that dominate art in the following eras.

In the Middle Heian period (894-1086), isolation from the continent led to development of a more synthesised Japanese style (wayō). By this stage the main pillars of Japanese visual culture are well established. The art and craft are all recognisably Japanese, with architecture being more closely tied to Chinese models. Zōchōten (Virudhaka) (839) (carved wood with lacquer, colour and gold leaf, 182.5 cm high) has the guardian king in an imposing martial stance, the elaborate drapery and clothing emphasising rather than concealing his stature. His fierce visage is turned in profile, powerfully framed by a halo of fire. There is nothing of such accomplishment from the same period in Europe. The author comments on similarities between this group of statues and Indian carving.

Lacquer work and inlay on furniture had an established repertoire of decorative motifs by the early C12^th – waves, flowers and other plants, mountains, clouds, animals. Painting was executed on scrolls, silk, fans, plaster walls, paper-panel walls and screens. Many paintings from temples or monasteries were discoloured by soot or destroyed by fire. The survival of painted screens from 1050-1100 allows us to get a glimpse of painting from the Late Heian period. Paintings at this time were religious, narrative or decorative in character; painting qua painting did not exist as a separate approach at this time. Japanese fans of the time were prized in China. The history of calligraphy is intertwined with those of handscrolls and fans. Buddhist scripture provided opportunities for imagination in the depiction of realms of heaven and hell, some of which are used as examples. Vivid scenes of suffering, famine, degradation and torture seem to be a mixture of observation of life at the time and pure imagination. The suffering of human existence is an important teaching of the Buddha, so such scenes are common throughout the region. A notable example is a grisly scene of the C13^th of putrefaction and bodily dissolution, Aspects of the Unclean Human Path. In the late C13^th a wave of Ch’an monks from China fleeing the Mongol invasion brought Zen teaching to Japan. It subsequently became the predominant school of Buddhism in the Japanese islands. Much of Japanese art continued to be influenced by China. One transplanted idea that the Japanese monks perfected was the idea of the dry garden, where water features were replaced by areas of raked gravel.

[Image: Great South Gate (1199), Tōdai-ji, Nara. Source: Wikimedia: By 663highland – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4369910%5D

The key architectural masterpiece in Japan is the Great South Gate (1199), Tōdai-ji, Nara featuring the classic double-roof, top roof steeply pitched, lower roof shallow, both with lifted corners. It houses two brilliantly expressive statues (1203) carved in wood by Unkei and Kaikei. For an analogue of great art that fuses realism and emotional hyper-expression we in the west could think of Grünewald’s Colmar Altarpiece (1512-6). Unkei’s other works display a forceful, reserved realism, including a masterful portrait of the monk Asanga (1212). Kaikei was more indebted to Song-style religious statuary. Wood carving at this time reached remarkable heights of competence and expressiveness without compromising the need to convey dignity and restraint. In contrast, painted portraits attributed to Fujiwara no Takanobu (d. 1204/5) situate the stylistic but realistic heads on bodies that are rendered geometric by their costumes.

[Image: Fujiwara no Takanobu (attr.), Portrait of Yoritomo (1179), ink on silk scroll, 29 x 236 cm. Source: Wikimedia]

The Nanbokuchō (1333-92) and Muromachi (1392-1573) periods brought advances in landscape painting and genre scenes of everyday life. Detached from historical and religious content, these areas allowed greater freedom for artists and patrons. (This coincides with the emergence of secular subjects in art in Renaissance Europe.) In the late C16^th Christian missionaries made a few converts in Japan and some Japanese painters began to mimic Western-style painting. Most of this was later destroyed in anti-Christian riots but what survives seems to have been of more historical curiosity than aesthetic value. Likewise, periodic fires destroyed temples and cities built using wood and paper, depriving us of a clear picture of early phases of Japanese architecture.

The modern period of Japan is the Edo period, lasting from 1615 to 1867. At this time, art became increasingly realistic and secular. The spectacular sliding-door decoration of Kanō Sanraku (1559-1635) and son Kanō Sansetsu (1590-1651), incorporating exquisite depiction of natural elements against a gold-leaf ground shows the sophistication of the period and the effortless application of fine-art technique to architectural use.

In the 1680s the ukiyo-e (floating world style) was established by Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694). These were genre scenes of everyday life in the pleasure quarters of Edo, featuring musicians, actors, geishas, courtesans and street life. Although best known in the prints of the time, the genre encompasses art in all forms. It is during the Edo period that the classic art of the colour woodblock print was developed (in 1765, by Suzuki Harunobu (1725?-1770)) and became for Westerners the epitome of Japanese visual culture. The economic sophistication of the system combined the skills of designer (eshi/gakō), cutter (horishi), printer (surishi) and publisher (hanmoto) (not neglecting the sellers) to produce an intricate system for the mass-production of great art.

In 1854 Japan was forcibly opened up to international trade and the 1867 appearance of a Japanese pavilion at the Paris international exposition marked the end of Japan’s isolation. This would mark the boom in japonisme in Europe and North America, which came to dominate the decorative arts and influenced the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. For better and worse, the art of the West also came to Japan, to very mixed results. Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was the most successful artist to adopt elements of Western style while remaining wedded to the advantages and traditions of Japan, working in prints. The adoption of copperplate engraving and oil paint used in conjunction with half-understood Western use of shading, perspective and so forth led to art that ranged from the beguiling to the deeply deficient. Many potentially competent Japanese artists ended up as makers of failed hybrids that seem ugly, ungainly and crude. Oil paint seems to have been disastrous for Japanese art, robbing it of its crispness, clarity, concision and planar qualities.

In 1867 Japanese society impressed Westerners as uniquely “Western” in its highly stratified social structure and very advanced literature and art, though lacking the widespread literacy and high average income that was beginning to begin standard in the West following the Industrial Revolution. Beyond less advanced societies in Asia, the Japanese were considered honorary Westerners in some respects. Even the tendency for women to paint their faces white was seen as a link to pale-skinned Westerners.

Japanese art of the Meiji and later periods is so wildly heterogeneous and mixed in character that it is hard for the author to describe or evaluate it. Making any general comments about Japanese art at this time is almost impossible and this is the weakest section of the book. Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) stands out among the printmakers, making the most of Japanese subject matter and Western style in his colour prints. It is among the artists of nihonga (Japanese style) that we find the best of C20^th art in Japan. The story reaches present day with some frames of anime and manga drawings, as well as fine-art paintings.

Tsuji explains the significance of the waves of different Buddhist teaching which directed cultural production, as well as how the art of Japan relates to the social, military, economic and imperial history of the nation. The use of proper terms will allow non-Japanese readers to acquire some familiarity – as they are defined as they are introduced – but the use does not seem excessive to this reviewer. The book has numerous illustrations of key works and typical examples. Even at 631 pages (of which 150 are reference), this book does seem long or overly detailed. Readers will likely close this book satisfied and inspired to search out monographs on certain artists and periods. As a guide History of Art in Japan meets its author’s intentions handsomely.

 

Tsuji Nobuo, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (trans.), History of Art in Japan, Columbia University Press, October 2019, paperback, 664pp, fully illus., $34.95/£27, ISBN 978 0 23119 341 2 (hardback available)

© 2019 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

Minoru Onoda

Minoru Onoda (1937-2008) is best known as a member of the Gutai movement. Gutai was a group of Japanese artists determined to practise radical art in the avant-garde Western manner. It was founded in 1954. They produced painting influenced by Abstract Expressionism. It placed an emphasis on the procedure of production, in effect engaging in Process Art. There was inherent theatricality in the production of their art, which were presented as spectacles involving music and non-art materials. The events were sometimes public and recorded, with the production sometimes more important than the resultant material. Art was made by destroying material or painting while swinging from a harness over a horizontal surface. The group defiantly opposed many of the conventions of Japanese art, adopting non-Japanese practices and standards. It has been seen as a rejection of Japanese nationalism and unique culture. (Onoda was born in occupied Manchuria.) Gutai attracted attention worldwide but also criticism from Japanese traditionalists and from Western critics, who decried its spectacle as shallow and derivative. The group was dissolved in 1972.

This new book examines Onoda as an independent artist. He worked in paint primarily, but his paintings included sculptural elements. The gently undulating surfaces created on the plywood panels he used play with our sense of depth and light and shade. He painted irregular swirling lines and circles of colour which filled picture surfaces, forming surfaces that seem in motion both across the surface and inwards and outwards. The patterns recede and project, growing tiny then large. This impression is enhanced by the swells on the panel surface. The ground colour that Onoda favoured was yellow, usually with lines and circles in warm colours. One essay author compares them to psychedelic art that became fashionable a few years later.

[Image: Minoru Onoda, WORK63-F (1963), oil, gofun and glue on plywood, 93.3 x 93 cm. © Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy of Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel]

This work began in 1962 and marks Onoda’s maturation as an artist and his first original contribution to the art of his time. In 1965 (the year that he joined the Gutai group) Onoda started using red grounds and began producing circular patterns on square boards.

[Image: Minoru Onoda, WORK66-13 (1966), oil, gofun and glue on plywood, 93.8 x 93.8 cm. © Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy of Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel]

This developed into sets that were hung in triptychs, lines and grids. By the early 1970s Onoda began a group of works using circular motifs in blue. He used electric blue acrylic paint applied with an airbrush over stencils. The softness of the graduated tones gives these pieces an air of otherworldliness; the sharp edges and clarity are those of technical designs and industrially manufactured products. These are more meditative, detached pictures than the playful swelling organic patterns. In these airbrushed paintings (all of the works have numbered titles) we find some kind of conciliation with the practice of Buddhist mindful contemplation. The versions in red-pink and black-grey have different affects; they are more assertive. In 1974 Onoda founded the New Geometric Art Group. The hard-edge paintings, with their fine patterns and brushless application of colour, are associated with Op Art, which was then popular.

[Image: Minoru Onoda, WORK79-Blue 47 (1979), Acrylic spray paint on cotton on plywood, 80 x 80 cm. © Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy of Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel]

Starting in 1984 Onoda commenced painted monochrome works on shaped panels, often placed over panels of different colour. The panels were usually square, with wavy edges and drilled holes at the edge or dramatically crossing the centre at a tangent. The last works (starting in 1991) were paintings of dark colours applied with blades. These are the least engaging works of Onoda’s career. Essays discuss Onoda’s aesthetic and associations (he had a natural tendency to participate in group activities) and discuss his career trajectory. Shoichi Hirai states that Onada’s dramatic changes in style led to a degree of scepticism in observers. Examples of the artist’s sketchbook drawings show rehearsals and projections.

Onoda claimed in a review that his drive was not negative but oblivious. “I am not rebelling against anything. Nor do I favor the new over the old or the old over the new. I am rejecting anything, pushing any ideology or expressing any: the works are simply works. There is nothing I would like to communicate through them except the works themselves. It is my belief that communication ceases the moment a work is completed.” This generous selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures – along with installation shots of exhibitions – along with helpful essays will allow readers to judge Onoda’s statement.

 

Anne Mosseri-Marlio (ed.), Minoru Onoda, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2018, hardback, 232pp, 176 col./7 mono illus., €68, ISBN 978 3 858 818218

 

© 2019 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan

 

The performance of beauty by women – and artistic representations of that performance – during the Meiji period (1868-1912) is the subject of new academic study by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit.

Bijin is a beautiful person, most usually by the Meiji era (and later) a beautiful woman. Bijinga is fine art featuring beautiful women. The bijinga genre was unofficially inaugurated through its presence in the 1907 Ministry of Education Art Exhibition, though it was grounded in developments over preceding decades. Lippit states that the shift in definition of bijin from a gender-neutral term to one being exclusively applicable to women is in part related to Japanese responses to foreign ideas. This accompanied other ideas, such as division of art into fine art and applied art and even the idea of a national style. “Just as the concept of a Japanese-style art (Nihonga) as such did not exist until artists started creating in the Western or non-traditional Japanese style (yōga), there was no totalizing concept of the artistic process until the modern encounter with Western aesthetics.” She concludes: “The bijin should not only be viewed, but its layers of pure covering – adornment on adornment – read as a statement on Japanese artistic style itself, a visual style that appears to have achieved a victory over the “spirit” of content: bijinga, an art that celebrates the aesthetic self-production of Japan – Japan as an artifact in the encounter between East and West.”

The birth of Nihonga and bijinga came about just as some Japanese felt the need to draw distinctions which separated its art from Western pictorial influences, which marks the intersection between nationalism and aesthetics. The categorisation of aspects of Japanese culture that had previously already existed in art could be considered an attempt to purify Japanese art and to clarify Japanese ethnic distinctiveness. Cultural critics of the late Meiji era theorised that Nihonga was characterised by idealism, in opposition to the supposed realism of Western art. Yōga cannot – because of its Western influence and greater realism – produce bijinga, which must be both Japanese in style and idealistic (and idealising) in character.

The term “geisha” appeared during the period of japonisme in the West (c. 1860-1930). Strictly speaking, a female performer and hostess and (slightly less strictly speaking) a prostitute of the Shin Yoshiwara red-light district of Tokyo, “geisha” came to be used in the West as any “beautiful Japanese woman”. For Westerners not informed about the original meaning of the word, this seems a casual elision rather than an intentional conflation of beautiful woman and prostitute. During this period, the Japanese woman as bijin who exists as a living work of art became a persistent subject for art and literature both inside and outside Japan.

The geographic and demographic distance between Japan and Europe/USA meant that what was known in the West about Japan was principally through its art. The sophistication of Japanese art and visual culture marked it out in the eyes of Westerners as a fellow civilised nation – if not an equal then certainly one worthy of respect. Visitors to Japan sometimes found the difference between the images they were used to and the reality of the extraordinarily elaborate artificiality of Japanese cosmetics repelled them. “Self-inflicted ugliness” was how one outspoken chronicler described Japanese cosmetic practice. Other travellers were simply disappointed by the reality of Japanese women, having been primed by extravagant praise.

Just as a complete woman was seen to be combination of innate qualities and effort of society (in the forms of education and culture) and effort of the individual (in the form of the acquisition of admirable skills and exercise of informed judgment), so it seems the bijin could come into being as a composite of natural beauty and unnatural beauty. It was through the grace of nature, the correct application of cosmetics and costume and exercise of decorum that the bijin came into existence. Thus when the artist of bijinga used both the model and ideal, he too created a composite.

One could also mention here the Japanese aesthetic appreciation of nature as perfected in mixtures of raw nature and tamed nature – like the bijin, that other prominent conjunction of natural and artificial beauty. There is certainly much to be written drawing out the parallels between bijin and distinctive gardens and temple grounds, all long cultivated and much celebrated as typical of Japan. In the bijin, we see the performance of beauty in an effort that is willed by both individual and the society of which she is a part. Once again – it cannot be stressed too strongly – the bijin is both self-actualisation and a product of aesthetic culture, one who necessarily fuses nature and artifice in a social performance of beauty.

In a publication for the 1904 St Louis World Fair, to which Japan sent 350 “geisha girls” as part of its pavilion, it is the nation of Japan alone that is represented by a women’s face in a montage of national/ethnic types. All other ethnic types in the illustration are represented by men. “Strategically nurtured as one of the images of the collective people as Japan was being constituted as a national subject, the nation of Japan performed its aesthetic self-production through the figure of the bijin, turning itself into a feminine artifact.” It is interesting that Japan would choose to present herself in such a way, eschewing the priestly and samurai classes and the iconic images of the Noh or Kabuki theatre, which were greatly esteemed in the country. It is the most pacific of national archetypes which we see so willingly presented by the Japanese and consumed by the West with so much alacrity. Just as the brief Russo-Japanese War was ongoing, it was the geisha who were sent by the Japanese government to enchant and beguile Americans.

In the bijin there is a necessary conflation of the real and the imaginary to produce a synthetic work of art – a melding of the two realms. It was in the figure of woman (or Woman) that an attempt was made to synthesise the natural and artificial, the actual and ideal, the universal and specific and the present and timeless, in what could be seen as what could be seen as a national achievement. The bijin could be considered a work of genius embodying national spirit and an expression of refinement of two thousand years of civilisation. The degree to which demographic isolation of Japan bred a cultural and ethnic difference from neighbouring nations – and how that influenced national standards of female beauty – is not examined in this book.

The bijinga seems to have been a matter of isolated single figures (in full-figure and portrait formats, with limited background) rather than what in West we would call genre pictures. The banning of the publication of nudes by the Japanese government in 1888 circumscribed shunga (erotic art) but may not have had a noticeable impact upon bijinga. Traditionally, the Japanese had no category of the nude as a self-contained subject. Bijinga is notably not a field of the nude figure, though this matter is only briefly touched upon here. The female nude when it appeared in Meiji art seems to have been more prominent in yōga, with its Western categories of the nude, rather than bijinga. The Japanese of the Meiji period, when introduced to nudes in Western art, adopted the artistic term of rataiga – “naked body”. This description precisely fails to convey the Western distinction between nudity and nakedness, the naked and the nude.

The author addresses the role of photographically illustrated bijin journals around 1910 and discussion of bijin by Japanese and foreign critics. There are some close readings of Japanese novels including of bijin figures. Lippit notes the importance of bijin fūzoku, namely the attendant customs, conventions and attributes of the bijin in bijinga. These allow viewers to read the pictures in a way in which our iconography allows us to interpret the symbolism of art. Some readers may wish that Lippit had further developed the issue of the conflict between timeless beauty of the bijin and the influence of ryūkō (fashion or trend). Lippit notes the etymological link between uses of ryūkō as “fashion” and “disease”. “Disease and fashion shared the characteristics of arriving from the outside, spreading rapidly, and mostly affecting urban areas. [..] It retained the sense of a dangerous current that could, in passing through a culture, potentially infect it en masse.”

This book is an absorbing study of the origins and uses of bijin in Japanese art of the Meiji period. It will feed curiosity about this subject and prompt more academic and popular studies of this fascinating topic.

 

Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit, Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan, Harvard University Asia Center, 2019, paperback, 315pp, 45 col. illus., $45, ISBN 978 0 674 237330 8

 

View my art and books here: www.alexanderadams.art

© Alexander Adams 2019

Balthus

[Image: Balthus, Les Enfants Blanchard (1937), oil on canvas, 125 x 130 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris, Donation by the heirs of Picasso, 1973/1978
© Balthus. Photo: RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau]

The art of Balthus (1908-2001) is hard to place. It is not Surrealist, although it was linked to Surrealism. It is not realism, though it is derived from life. It is allied to tradition but is not traditional. It is not Modernist but could not have existed without Modernism. It is erotic but it is not erotica. To class it as Post-Modern would be completely erroneous. What is its lineage? It is European but – like its chameleon creator – it cannot be placed. The artist was born in France of Polish descent, growing up in France, Germany and Switzerland, later spending many years in Italy before moving to Switzerland with his Japanese wife. To think accurately about this European painter you need to know Japanese art and Persian miniatures; to discuss this friend and associate of Artaud, Giacometti, Picasso and Derain you will need to remember Chardin, Piero della Francesca, Georges de la Tour and Courbet. Through extended study you will come to recognise his models yet they are transformed through art into images distinctly different from life and artificial. If you expect anything to be straightforward about Balthus then you are misapprehending the art. No matter how complex, allusive and humorous the artist becomes, he is never less than absolutely serious.

Welcome to the world of Balthus.

The current exhibition Balthus (2 September 2018-1 January 2019, Fondation Beyeler, Basel; touring to Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) forms a lean retrospective. (Reviewed here from the catalogue.) The exhibition consists of 40 oil paintings from all periods, starting when the artist was aged 20 and ending with his last completed painting, made when the artist was in his eighties. Considering the relatively small number of paintings, it is perhaps wise that drawings and watercolours have been excluded. The aim is establish a clear view of Balthus main subjects in a selection of representative paintings from the full span of his career.

All of Balthus’s subjects are included: portraits, conversation pieces, street scenes, landscapes and nudes. There is a hybrid work where a still-life is presented with a figure in the form of an incidental profile, not dissimilar to pictures by Bonnard of set tables. Paintings have been brought from around the world for this two venue tour.

Balthus’s first paintings were views of Paris, his home city. Place de l’Odéon, Quai Malaquais and Jardin de Luxembourg appear as they did in the 1920s. The youthful pictures are peopled by stock figures among sturdy trees and roughly painted architecture. They display a sure sense of colour and establish some of the staples of his later street scenes, though the skill and complexity are yet to manifest themselves fully.

The 1934 solo exhibition at Pierre Loeb’s Paris gallery established Balthus’s reputation as a singular – even wayward – painter of figures and assaulter of public morals. His most provocative early nudes – Alice dans le miroir (1933) and La leçon de guitare (1934), the latter of which was considered so sensational it was hidden behind a curtain at the Loeb gallery – have not travelled to Basel. However a number of works from that exhibition are here, including a scene from Wuthering Heights showing Cathy at her toilette.

[Image: Balthus, La Rue (1933), oil on canvas, 195 x 240 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bequeathed by James Thrall Soby. © Balthus. Photo: © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence]

La Rue (1933) the large showstopper of the Paris exhibition has travelled to Switzerland from MoMA. The Parisian street is animated by figures who seem nearly wholly allegorical, lifted from book illustrations or old paintings, disconnected from each other. These atomised personages seem oblivious of each other and immersed in their own dreams, with the exception of the youth groping the girl. Whether or not is understands that she is being assaulted is unclear. Her face is impassive and her body language is stilted, not in motion (fighting or fleeing); it is hard to read her response. The youth was originally groping her crotch. The first owner demanded that Balthus alter La Rue to make it less indecorous, which he did. Balthus wavered on the subject of sexual provocativeness. He repainted a number of pictures to make them less overtly erotic. How much of that was genuinely held regret and how much was social positioning is unclear. In early years he shocked to gain attention and notoriety; in later years he curbed his earlier provocations in a bid for acceptance. That said, he did continue to paint nudes in his late years. It may be that he was simply swayed by the requests of his sitters and collectors to make their pictures more genteel. The famous narcissist and headstrong loner may have been less indomitable than he is sometimes presented.

In the late 1930s Balthus painted portraits. Sadly, the imposing and psychologically astute portraits of Derain and Miró have not travelled to Basel but the La Jupe blanche (1937) has. This full length portrait of Antoinette, Balthus’s first wife, shows the model in white clothing, rumpled creamy drapery clinging to the flesh and mimicking the pallor of her skin. The subject is a sensual and languorous object of desire while remaining detached and melancholic, sulky and bored; the subject is ultimately unreachably distant. That, of course, only makes the subject more alluring and memorable.

The late 1930s were Balthus’s Thérèse period, when Thérèse Blanchard modelled for 11 paintings, including a double-portrait with her brother. That painting was bought by Picasso and is loaned by Musée Picasso, Paris. Girls at the point of puberty or in adolescence henceforward became a constant subject. Girls at the threshold of becoming women present potent and changeable subjects because of the daily fluctuation and overlap between childhood and maturity, innocence and knowledge, timidity and adventurousness. In today’s society older girls are subjects bounded by taboos that go unspoken and sometimes unrecognised until they are transgressed.

Compare Balthus’s girls with depictions of girls of the same age by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805).

[Images: (left) Balthus, Thérèse (1938), oil on cardboard on wood, 100.3 x 81.3 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequeathed by Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil, in honor of William S. Lieberman, 1987. © Balthus, Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence; (right) Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Broken Pitcher (1770)]

In Greuze’s tableaux the subjects are deflowered waifs and violated innocents. Although the purpose of Greuze was ostensibly moral and didactic, the subjects are salacious confections of wretchedness. The paintings are not so much moral warnings of the dangers of abuse as sadistic lingering upon the impact of that abuse. In contrast, Balthus’s subjects are mysterious beings, distant, playful and autonomous. Balthus’s paintings are as ambiguous and rich as people are, whereas Greuze’s paintings are shallow, one-note and fundamentally dishonest: ostensibly moral yet actually prurient. In Balthus’s paintings of adolescents we find an innovation in portraiture of the young that had not been seen since the portraits of children by Géricault in the 1810s.

In 1940, demobilised from the French army and living in the countryside, Balthus turned seriously to the subject of landscape. Two landscapes from the 1940s are included. Clarity and solidity are two of the primary attributes of Balthus’s landscapes. Balthus’s work became more mannered and artificial. When he was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome in 1961, Balthus became ever more engaged in ancient and non-Western art. He paid careful attention to every detail of the restoration of the academy’s home, the Renaissance Villa Medici. Balthus took pleasure in building surfaces in his paintings that evoke the thick encrusting of pigment on old plaster. References to Greek and Roman art abound. A visit to Japan is seen in several paintings and the relationship with his future second wife, Setsuko. The Basel exhibition includes the fragile and laboriously worked La Chambre turque (1965-6), which combines Persian and Japanese art in a painting of Setsuko. Experimentation with casein and tempera allowed Balthus to accentuate flatness and matte surfaces but at the expense of pliability. The increased rigidity led to thick and brittle paint surfaces which are fragile, especially on flexible canvas.

[Image: Balthus, Le Chat au miroir III (1989-94), Oil on canvas, 220 x 195 cm. Private collection, Asia. © Balthus]

Le Chat au miroir III (1989-94) shows a seated girl looking into a mirror, accompanied by a cat (a familiar motif for the artist). It is the artist’s last complete work. It is a summation of what came before but it is undercut by weaknesses in handling and conception. The extended gestation of the painting and frequent revisions are not so much evidence of a meditative patience but of a reluctance to finish, perhaps even of uncertainty. The artist may have felt the work was his last and was fearful of finishing and thereby cutting a cord to his working life and legacy. Too much rested on the painting and the desire to imbue it with a lifetime of knowledge and insight may have held the artist back. It might have been better to have worked on a number of minor pictures instead. It is some distance from his best work.

The catalogue is large format and profusely illustrated. The decision to place some illustrations as double-page spreads is regrettable. Illustrations should never be treated this way because it distorts the image by introducing a band of shadow and compression. Otherwise the production is good. Using strong (though not overpowering) colours for the margins of illustrations is effective. Brilliant white margins can clash with images, especially with richly coloured and tonally muted paintings such as Balthus’s.

Catalogue texts discuss works in the exhibition and illustrate others not included, including key works such as La leçon de guitare and the Miró portrait. One particularly useful text by Juan Ángel López-Manzanares deals with Balthus’s relationship with Antonin Artaud. The pair met in 1932 or 1933 and Balthus designed the sets for Les Cencis, the 1935 staging Artaud’s adaptation of Shelley’s verse drama. Balthus painted some portraits of actresses, including two of Iya Abdy. There are passing references to Balthus’s art as an expression Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The Theatre of Cruelty was the idea that naturalism and character had robbed Western theatre of the power of spectacle and mystery and that in order to restore the role of the sacred in theatre the dramatist and actors had to connect to the audience through transformational action and powerful emotion. The idea of Balthus’s early art running parallel to the Theatre of Cruelty – especially in the still-lifes of destroyed objects and the more aggressively erotic nudes – is a feasible thesis.

 

Raphaël Bouvier & Fondation Beyeler (eds.), Balthus, Fondation Beyeler/Hatje Cantz, 2018, paperback, 176pp, 120 illus., CHF62.50/€58.00, ISBN 978 3 7757 4445 4 (German and hardback versions available)

©2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books at www.alexanderadams.art

New Representations in Japanese Architecture

 

Pictures of the Floating Microcosm. New Representations of Japanese Architecture examines the way Japanese architecture is presented in graphic presentations. It covers the last twenty years of architectural design in commercial, civic and domestic fields. The illustrations consist of hand-drawn designs, plans, cross-sections, isometric elevations, 3D renderings and frames of CAD – alongside hybrid forms. These drawings are not rough sketches, working drawings or technical blueprints; they are representations made specifically for public display. They are pared down to their essence, conceptualised and aestheticised. There is an emphasis on clean space, elegance and clarity and a preference for schematic presentation over realism, as is common in the field. The layout of this book emphasises the clarity and sparseness of much Japanese architectural design.

Meystre discusses advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to drafting, including hybrid techniques and physical models, all viewed from the perspective of the digital age. There is a discussion of photographs of miniatures, an innovation from the Twentieth Century still used. Meystre notes the artistry of the photographer of models, commenting that frequently in Japan the photographer is credited with more creative input and control of these photographs than the architect or the builder of the model. As one would expect in a book dealing with architect presentations, there are no photographs of completed buildings. The author’s interviews with architects Ryūe Nishizawa, Kazuyo Sejima and others inform his discourse, with quotes illuminating views of practitioners.

The author notes that there is a generational change in Japanese architecture, which determined the 20-year limitation to his study. “One notable phenomenon of the recent history of Japanese architectural criticism is that whereas architects such as Kazao Shinohara, Fumihiko Maki, and Arata Isozaki wrote intensely and regularly throughout their careers, their younger colleagues have been very discreet regarding their theoretical positions.”

[Image: Hideyuki Nakayama, My Vision for Tokyo (2009) © Hideyuki Nakayama]

In the last two decades, information technology has also radically altered the way architecture is presented and understood by creators and public. Meystre notes that the increasing sophistication and flexibility of imaging technology has allowed architects greater flexibility and permitted experimentation that would have been costly, difficult or time consuming previously. One example is the use of radically reduced-scale images, which has become more commonly lately. “There is no limit to zooming within a window. The upshot is that digital lines, intrinsically, have no scale. […] The result is a common tendency among many architects to make the lines of their drawings spiderlike, to the point of invisibility.”

Use of computers has allowed the development of multiple isolines – hypothetical lines linking positions sharing a common property, such as height, light, temperature, barometric pressure and so forth. The lines map not structures or physical features but qualities. These linear matrices are accurate in visual terms and which produce images that are almost unrecognisable (almost arbitrary) when compared to conventional plans and come close to abstraction. Isoline projections can act as aids to contemplative thinking, in that they disrupt our standard assumptions about what a built structure is and reveal unseen and unconsidered aspects of it, prompting us to think in unexpected ways.

[Image: Ryūe Nishizawa, Hiroshi Senju Museum, Karuizawa (2013) © Ryūe Nishizawa]

The question of how Japanese these presentations are is reflected in the way designs are seen and discussed. In the Japanese language, words describing space have value connotations: omote is “front surface” and “superficial” (something similar to the use in English of “façade”); ura “hidden side” and “authentic”; yami “near darkness” which limits persons and objects in darkness to a level where they are sensed rather than seen, has its origin in the Shinto concept of intuition; yūgen (noun and adjective functioning as an epithet, attribute or noun) meaning (variously) “remote/enclosed/profound/calm/dark mystery/secrecy/depth”, of Buddhist origin, has multiple aesthetic and spiritual attributes. Thus the Japanese ascribe associations and an attendant codified hierarchy of values to their spatial vocabulary.

[Image: Hideyuki Nakayama, O House (2010) © Hideyuki Nakayama]

In practical terms, Meystre suggests this attachment to yami qualities of muted or dim light is reflected in a partiality towards depicting architectural spaces in light that is generally less intense than that encountered in typical Western presentations. However, Meystre goes on to point out that in Japanese architectural practices most cardboard models are made in white and photographed (or altered digitally) in ways that generate over-exposure. This apparent contradiction between a preference for muted light and overexposure in photography is not resolved by the author.

An oddity of the language used by new architects in Japan is the use of kawaii, “cute”, in the vocabulary of design. The term is usually used in relation to low art, animation, manga and discussion of attractiveness, especially in relation to animals and young women and girls. Kawaii in architecture is about ornamentation of plans through use of plants, decoration, furniture and moveable items.

[Image: Junya Ishigami, Row House, Tokyo (2008) © Junya Ishigami]

When these objects are included in illustrations they are necessarily miniaturised, those enhancing their kawaii quality through reduced toy-like, dream-like or charming appearance. This charm offsets the sparse clinical appearance of plans. Another reason the Japanese is linguistic or conceptual; inclusion of small utensils in Japanese designs – something Western designers usually omit – is partly due to the Japanese distinct conception of furniture. Kagu means “utensils for the house”, not differentiating from tables, beds and cutlery. Thus, for the Japanese, there is no threshold between the larger items and the smaller ones – which generates kawaii – whereas Western architects perceive firm qualitative differences between a vase and a table a Japanese does to a lesser extent.

Practicality and reality are not addressed in drawings, as is usual in such schemes. Like painters who cover their under-painting, ruler lines and adjusted positions with a final layer of paint – thereby concealing the secrets of their art – these architects show their final position as clear, unaltered and almost inevitable. There is a section which shows parallels between recent architectural projections and ukiyo-e colour woodblock prints. New designs even quote classic prints, linking illustrations to revered art. There is an essay about the genealogy of prominent architects of the last century and the way influence has been transmitted between them.

There are limitations to the book. The author intends this book to survey new aspects of architectural imagery from Japan rather than familiarise us with any single project. Dimensions are generally not included and rarely are settings or surrounding structures shown in designs. Although examples of approaches discussed in the text are shown, the priority is the overall survey of graphic representation rather than a close reading of any single image or project through a concentrated body of text and illustrations. (Many of the captions within illustrations are illegibly small, as we are not expected to read images in search of specific information.) It might have been illuminating to have a single building presented through various illustrations emphasising particular qualities.

Readers are left somewhat in the dark as to how effective the illustrations are at conveying an accurate or useful impression of the proposed structure. While Meystre is very good at presenting and explicating modes of illustration, he does not assess the efficacy of any of the modes nor of specific examples. Without that expert assessment, we – as lay readers – are left uncertain as to the usefulness and efficacy of the modes that are characteristic of recent Japanese illustration. Surely, functionality is one aspect that may be if not the primary then certainly a significant matter in our understanding of the material illustrated here.

Overall, Pictures of the Floating Microcosm offers a refreshing perspective on architectural presentation, giving a well-researched grounding for an analysis of recent developments and current trends in Japanese conceptualisations of architecture. It will also be of use to those interested in Japanese visual and linguistic culture.

 

Oliver Meystre, Pictures of the Floating Microcosm. New Representations of Japanese Architecture, Park Books, 2017, hardback, 240pp, 165 col. illus., English version (German version available), ISBN 978 3 03860 054 1

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books at www.alexanderadams.art

Japanese Prints in the Collection of Vincent Van Gogh

 

[Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, The Outskirts of Koshigaya in Musashi Province, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, 1858, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)]

In 1886 Vincent Van Gogh bought a batch of around 660 Japanese woodblock prints from a Paris dealer. He intended to sell them on for a profit, benefitting from the fashion for Japonisme that had been current since the Exposition Universelle in 1878. As it turned out, he did not buy especially good examples of prints, opting for quantity over quality. His February-March 1887 display at the Le Tambourin café was a commercial failure (in a catalogue essay Chris Uhlenbeck suggests Van Gogh overpriced) and Van Gogh and his brother were left with unsold stock. Those unsold prints became a resource for the artist. Van Gogh was already aware of Japanese prints before but now, with a large selection to hand, he could examine them at length and absorb the style of masters such as Utagawa Hiroshige, Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Kunisada.

This catalogue adds more to the recent exhibition Van Gogh and Japan (see my review here).

He used the prints to decorate his rooms and planned to trade them for works of art, though apparently this did not come to pass. Some prints went to his sister Willemien and after her death these returned to the collection of Vincent Van Gogh junior (son of Theo). Thus most of the 660 prints Van Gogh bought passed eventually to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The current count is 511 sheets.

The classic Japanese colour woodblock print was discovered in 1765, developing from the uncoloured print. It is characterised by prominent black linear designs separating flat planes of strong unmixed colour, strong diagonal and absence of chiaroscuro and shadow (in the early period). A lot of this fed into the paintings that Van Gogh made in south of France 1888-90. Indeed when he arrived in the region for the first time he wrote ecstatically to his brother about the intense light and vivid colours as being the Japan of Europe.

Hokusai’s manga (sketchbooks, published over many decades) included drawings of people, flora, fauna and supernatural beings. The manga were an inspiration for Van Gogh and led to his refining his drawing technique with ink and reed pen. This catalogue only touches upon that, as it is addressed in other books in detail.

Some sheets Van Gogh bought were only parts of triptychs. For practical reasons, Japanese prints used sheets at a standard size, so for larger pictures makers used multiple linked designs printed on individual sheets and hung them together. Uhlenbeck writes, “Van Gogh unfortunately never commented in writing on multiple-sheet compositions. It is possible that he did not know that many of the designs in his collection were incomplete, and this may have affected his conception of the Japanese rules of composition.”

[Image: Utagawa Kunisada, View of the Spring Rain, central sheet of a triptych, 1820–29, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)]

 

There are a number of notable absences in the collection. There are few horizontal landscapes, which may have been in the Le Tambourin exhibition and later confiscated by creditors when the café was closed. The absence of war scenes may have been because fewer of those prints were exported by Japanese traders keen to downplay their country’s violent past. The absence of shunga (erotic prints) might have been because they were too pricey for Van Gogh. It is hard to know what exactly motivated Van Gogh’s choices, apart from cost and availability. Did he buy what he thought would appeal to general collectors or what he found appealing? Did he aim to collect work that presented a variety in terms of subject, age and format or were these aspects relatively unimportant?

While there are a number of fine prints, the majority are not outstanding pieces according to experts. For example, there are no prints by Hokusai, who was by 1886 already too well known and costly for Van Gogh. There are a number of prints featuring trees, particularly ones with jutting irregular trunks and branches and it is reasonable to assume that these images caught Van Gogh’s eye because they reminded him of the trees of his native Brabant. In these cases at least, Van Gogh was using his personal artistic taste in the selection.

Van Gogh was especially partial towards so-called “crépon” prints (technically chirimen-e), which were prints which had been subjected to a mechanical process which textured the paper. Uhlenbeck describes the process of crêping, which led to the paper crinkling and shrinking, the edges becoming uneven. He bought 20 examples. It seems at least some of the crépon prints in Van Gogh’s collection were recent and manufactured expressly for the export market.

This catalogue presents new information about the prints. Data regarding artists, subjects and dates have rounded out our knowledge about the collection. The conditions of prints have been assessed and the illustrations show the uncropped sheets, including the tattered margins and pinholes, showing how the prints were handled and used. Van Gogh is known to have pinned some to walls and specks of oil paint can be detected, meaning that they were hung near his easel. The prints that he copied have been identified. There are missing prints and Van Gogh did know other prints from books, magazines, illustrations and visits to galleries. Even so, this largely intact collection provides us with a useful resource which allows us to understand Van Gogh’s taste and knowledge.

 

Louis van Tilborgh (ed.), Japanese Prints: The Collection of Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam/Thames & Hudson, 2018, hardback, $45, 224pp, over 170 col. illus., ISBN 978 0500 23 9896

© Alexander Adams

Itō Shinsui

[Image: Itō Shinsui, Hair (1952), woodblock print, ink and pigments on paper, © Taiyo no Hikari Foundation, Japan, 2018]

 

The opening up of Japan to the West in 1868 and the drive to modernise and industrialise presented Japanese artists with serious questions. How could Japanese art stay truly Japanese in the face of Western art and technology? Would modernity rob Japanese culture of vital aspects? Could an artist be both Japanese and modern or was that an inherent contradiction?

Japanese society was changing rapidly and the arts reflected that. While japonisme became the fashion in the West, Japan was adjusting to incorporate Western influence. Shin hanga (new prints) was an element of the traditional nihonga (Japanese-style painting) movement, which was set up in opposition to the sōsaku hanga (creative prints) part of yōga (Western-style painting). Nihonga commenced as an official tendency in 1890 expressly to counter Western influence in culture. Shin hanga was promoted by publishers as a revival of the traditional ukiyo-e school and used traditional woodblock-printing methods and division of labour. At this time many of the skills of the ukiyo-e (Edo period) printmakers were dying out as new technology (such as lithography) were rendering the labour-intensive woodblock printing process outmoded. Shin hanga was an attempt to capitalise on the Western demand for Japanese prints, by effectively reviving the tradition of ukiyo-e, but it was also popular among the Japanese. The traditional subjects had a nostalgic appeal and presented Japan in idealised form at a time when daily life was becoming divorced from the rural routine of life.   

The exhibition Itō Shinsui: Tradition and Modernity, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (1 March-20 May 2018) presents the art of one of the most renowned shin hanga printmakers, Itō Shinsui (1898-1972). Joan Miró visited Japan and was influenced by East Asian art – and his art was popular in Japan – so it is only fitting that this survey as a modern Japanese master is presented at his foundation in Barcelona.

[Image: Itō Shinsui, Before the Mirror (1916), woodblock print, ink and pigments on paper, © Taiyo no Hikari Foundation, Japan, 2018]

 

Shinsui was trained by Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1972). Shinsui, who trained as a painter, made his first print Before the Mirror (1916) aged 18. It was the epitome of the approach and subject matter that would come to dominate the 147 prints he designed: the young beautiful woman, seen in a moment of private reflection, depicted with clarity, elegance and refinement. Although Shinsui’s subjects were traditional, he was not an avowed traditionalist in his style. The unusual and innovative compositions and colour choices make his art distinct from the masters of the ukiyo-e. Close-ups and angles make his work distinct. His decision to leave some marks of the baren (printing paddle) used to rub the paper over the inked block distinguishes his prints from the smooth inking of the ukiyo-e printers. At first glance, this makes his prints look like lithographs, with the crayon marks visible. Could this decision be related to the late Nineteenth Century French practice of heavy inking of etching plates? In this way printers and artists could make impressions unique by varying the inking to highlight certain qualities. Before the Snow (1926) seems to employ a patterned embossing on the woman’s fur collar but this goes unremarked upon in the catalogue.

The trilingual catalogue is published by the Taiyo no Hikari Foundation, Japan, lender of the 100 prints exhibited in Barcelona. It is an attractive book, with Japanese-paper flyleaves. It includes discussions of Shinsui’s art, handsome illustrations and a chronology of the artist’s life. A section covers the process of Japanese woodblock printmaking. The only absence is a discussion of how Shinsui’s printmaking relates to his painting. However, for Westerners unfamiliar with even the best known of Shinsui’s paintings, that would have required too much space. It is disappointing that the page gutter bisects two-page illustrations. Illustrations should never be placed over two pages. Otherwise the catalogue is faultless.

The women have the pallid skin colour typical of Japanese conventions of beauty, with slight rosy flushes on the cheeks and nipples. Faces are stylised. Clothing is generally traditional, featuring the flowing robes, sashes and printed fabrics with bold designs typical of the Edo period. In some prints Shinsui presents modern Japanese women in Western clothes: in berets, skirts and neckties, with hair short, curled or parted. In one print he showed a woman next to a Western clock. Although Shinsui advocated for the portrayals of life to include elements that were characteristic of the period – as a form of historical record – his own practice erred strongly in favour of the showing scenes typical of the past periods. In perhaps only the slightest detail do some of the prints show us the reality of Twentieth century Japan.

In Shinsui’s prints we find the crisp lines and strong patterns we would expect. Typical to Japanese prints are areas of pattern, such as blinds, walls, waves, raindrops and printed fabrics. In a handful of prints the style is Western, following the current styles of colour illustration that were widely available in Japan. These are the least successful prints. Midday in a Summer Resort (1941) is an example. The generic colour scheme, cartoon-style abbreviations and the deep and cluttered pictorial field all go against the strengths of shin hanga and Shinsui’s style. Shinsui’s printmaking evolved relatively little in terms of style, though his subjects varied over the different series he made.

[Image: Itō Shinsui, Mount Fuji as seen from Mitohama Beach (1938), woodblock print, ink and pigments on paper, © Taiyo no Hikari Foundation, Japan, 2018]

 

Many landscape prints are included in the exhibition. They are rural scenes in the main: a hut in a snowy mountains, a river bridge in the rain, a coastal view, fields below mountains. These are conventional subjects. The images were drawn from personal observation rather than ideal fabrications or variations upon existing archetypes. The dramatic tonal range and juxtapositions of strong colours distinguish Shinsui’s landscapes.

This excellent book is the most comprehensive book in English on the artist and would make an essential addition to any library covering Japanese art.

Akiko Katsuta, Katsuyama Shigeru & Khanh Trinh, Itō Shinsui, Taiyo no Hikari Foundation, 2018, text Spanish/Catalan/English, paperback, 210pp, fully col. illus., €25, ISBN 978 84 16411 37 5