Byline: Mark Jenkins
One of the most-told stories about 19th-century art recounts how prints from Japan, suddenly available in the West after the country was wrenched open in the 1850s, profoundly altered European painting. But the influences flowed both ways. In Japan, the mass-produced woodblocks that excited Van Gogh and Whistler yielded to sosaku hanga ("creative prints"), inspired by Western ideas of self-expression. This is the subject of "The Print Generation," a retrospective at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art.
Where Edo period (1603-1868) woodblocks were drawn, engraved and printed separately by multiple artists and artisans, all the steps to make a sosaku hanga print were the responsibility of the individual artist. One of them, Shinagawa Takumi, even renounced preliminary drawings. Without them, he explained, "I feel that my hand and my mind are working together in an act of creation."
The movement's beginning is usually dated to 1904, a decade before the earliest work in this survey. Crucial to developing the new style was the Ichimokukai, a group of printmakers who met monthly from 1939 to 1955 under the leadership of Onchi KÅshirÅ. But the upstart artists didn't really thrive until after the end of World War II, in part because of the patronage of Americans who arrived in Japan after its 1945 surrender.
One of them was James Michener, deployed to the Pacific as a U.S. Navy lieutenant. Before he published most of his best-known novels, he wrote the text for two books of Japanese prints, one of which is included in this show. Michener was close enough to the postwar printmakers that one of them, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, made a portrait of him. The print, also on display, is among the few black-and-white images in the selection.
The Michener likeness is chiseled in the strong black outlines typical of Japanese prints made before the country engaged directly with the West. More typical of the exhibition's artworks, however, are softer forms rendered in color without outlines. The results can suggest watercolor paintings more than woodblocks.
If the style is different from that of isolationist-era prints, the subjects are often similar. Among the show's earliest works are two series of views of Tokyo, a theme familiar from Edo-period woodblocks. But the prints made from 1928 to 1932 depict a gas station and a department store interior as well as the customary temples, shrines and gardens. The second series, from 1945, is more poignant, since it depicts sites damaged or entirely destroyed by U.S. firebombing.
Onchi was making abstract pictures as early as 1932, the year of his delicate "Lyric No. 2." But few of the artists included in this show followed his example. Instead, they focused on details of realistic scenes in ways that emphasized pattern over documentation, as in Sekino Jun'ichirÅ's immersive "Tile Roof." Another strategy was to distill recognizable elements to elementary forms. Hashimoto Oki'ie took that approach for the elegant "Misty Pond," as did Inagaki Tomo'o in the playfully exuberant "Quarrel of Cats." Shima Tamami's "Birds (Cranes)" positions a trio of stylized black creatures atop overlapping pink and lavender motifs, while Saito Kiyoshi's "Dachshund" neatly integrates wood grain into a dog's fur.
One precedent for abstraction in Japanese art is high-art calligraphy, in which intuitive expression overwhelms legibility. In Yoshida Chizuko's boldly kinetic "What Is Within No. 2," the overlapping black and red patterns suggest calligraphic brushstrokes. Perhaps the most Western of these works, Kinoshita Tomio's "Sky No. 1," depicts an oval filled with rough holes in a style that combines aspects of minimalism and pop art.
Yoshida's print is one of several by women, whose emergence as artists was another development new to 20th-century Japan. Although women had long worked in the printmaking process, they were rarely the primary creator. Also featured here are works by Matsubara Naoko, whose stylized views of her native Kyoto were made after she emigrated to North America, and Iwami Reika, whose "Water Reflection" deftly sets off black-and-white forms with a gold accent and a white-on-white embossed pattern.
The exhibition, drawn from the museum's Kenneth and Kiyo Hitch Collection and the Gerhard Pulverer Collection, also includes examples of books whose designs and illustrations are part of sosaku hanga's multigenerational legacy. The books, like the prints, demonstrate both a break from and a continuity with Edo-period art. Fresh techniques and independent outlooks shaped the new prints, but they didn't banish the traditional interests in natural beauty, ingenious compositions and the contemplation of everyday life. For Japanese printmaking, sosaku hanga was a reinterpretation, not a rebellion.