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WD_154/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0154 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy-five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad about Drawing.'
-Hokusai, The Drawings of Hokosai, In Art/Drawing.
Hokusai (1760-1849)
Hokusai, Japan's best known artist, is ironically Japan's least Japanese artist. Japan's best known woodblock painting, The Great Wave, is very un-Japanese. Welcome to the artist often known as Hokusai.
Hokusai (1760-1849) lived during the Tokugawa period (1600 to 1867). In a Japan of traditional Confucian values and feudal regimentation, Hokusai was a thoroughly Bohemian artist: cocky, quarrelsome, restless, aggressive, and sensational. He fought with his teachers and was often thrown out of art schools. As a stubborn artistic genius, he was single-mindedly obsessed with art. Hokusai left over 30,000 works, including silk paintings, woodblock prints, picture books, manga, travel illustrations, erotic illustrations, paintings, and sketches. Some of his paintings were public spectacles which measured over 200 sq. meters (2,000 sq. feet.) He didn't care much for being sensible or social respect; he signed one of his last works as "The Art-Crazy Old Man". In his 89 years, Hokusai changed his name some thirty times (Hokusai wasn't his real name) and lived in at least ninety homes. We laugh and recognize him as an artist, but wait, that's because we see him as a Western artist, long before the West arrived in Japan.
Hokusai started out as a art student of woodblocks and paintings. During the 600-year Shogun period, Japan had sealed itself off from the rest of the world. Contact with Western culture was forbidden. Nevertheless, Hokusai discovered and studied the European copper-plate engravings that were being smuggled into the country. Here he learned about shading, coloring, realism, and landscape perspective. He introduced all of these elements into woodblock and ukiyo-e art and thus revolutionized and invigorated Japanese art.
Although Chinese and Japanese paintings had been using long distance landscape views for 1,500 years, this style had never entered the woodblock print. Ukiyo-e woodblocks were produced for bourgeoisie city gentry who wanted images of street life, sumo wrestlers, and geishas. The countryside and peasants were ignored.
What was the influence on Hokusai? Here's an example of Dutch landscape art:
In Holland in the late 1500s, artists such as Claes Jansz Visscher and Willem Buytewech developed landscape art, which focused on topographically-correct landscape representation. Landscape art reached its peak between 1630 and 1660 through Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Jan van Goyen. By the late 1700s, these Dutch paintings had become so common that the etchings were used as cheap illustrations. Dutch merchants smuggled their goods into Japan. These wares were often wrapped in paper that had been illustrated with these etchings. For Hokusai and other artists, the thrown-away wrappers were more interesting than the imports.
Hokusai learned from Dutch and French pastoral landscapes with their perspective, shading, and realistic shadows and turned them into Japanese landscapes. More importantly, he introduced the serenity of nature and the unity of man and his surroundings into Japanese popular art. Instead of shoguns, samurai, and their geishas, which were the common topics of Japanese illustrative art at the time, Hokusai placed the common man into his woodblocks, moving the emphasis away from the aristocrats and to the rest of humanity. In The Great Wave, tiny humans are tossed around under giant waves, while enormous Mt. Fuji is a hill in the distance.
Hokusai's most famous picture and easily Japan's most famous image is a seascape with Mt. Fuji. The waves form a frame through which we see Mt. Fuji in the distance. Hokusai loved to depict water in motion: the foam of the wave is breaking into claws which grasp for the fishermen. The large wave forms a massive yin to the yang of empty space under it. The impending crash of the wave brings tension into the painting. In the foreground, a small peaked wave forms a miniature Mt. Fuji, which is repeated hundreds of miles away in the enormous Mt. Fuji which shrinks through perspective; the wavelet is larger than the mountain. Instead of shoguns and nobility, we see tiny fishermen huddled into their sleek crafts as they slide down a seamount and dive straight into the wave to make it to the other side. The yin violence of Nature is counterbalanced by the yang relaxed confidence of expert fishermen. Oddly, though it's a sea storm, the sun is shining.
To Westerners, this woodblock seems to be the quintessential Japanese image, yet it's quite un-Japanese. Traditional Japanese would have never painted lower-class fishermen (at the time, fishermen were one of the lowest and most despised of Japanese classes); Japanese ignored nature; they would not have used perspective; they wouldn't have paid much attention to the subtle shading of the sky. We like the painting because it's familiar to us. This Japanese pastoral painting originated in Western art: landscape, long-distance perspective, nature, and ordinary humans. The Giant Wave is actually a Western painting, seen through Japanese eyes.
Hokusai didn't merely use Western art. He transformed Dutch pastoral paintings by adding the Japanese style of flattening and the use of color surfaces as a element. By the the 1880's, Japanese prints were the rage in Western culture and Hokusai's prints were studied by young European artists, such as Van Gogh, in a style called Japonaiserie. Thus Western painting returned to the West.
-From "Hokusai" by Andreas Ramos, © 1995-2004 andreas.com/ japanese.about.com
A HISTORY OF THE UKIYO-E WOODBLOCK PRINT:
As the 16th century drew to a close, an urban bourgeoisie emerged in Edo, capital of the Tokugawa shogunate since 1603, as well as in other major cities such as Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai. These merchants, artisans and lordless samurai of low rank (ronin) developed a very special way of life with its own distinct literature and art, which came to be known as ukiyo. Ukiyo in early Japanese poetry is the floating, transient, idle world. As originally used in Chinese poetry, the term is resonant with the pessimism and melancholy of Buddhist philosophy. By the middle of the 17th century in Japan, it had acquired a new meaning. During these years ukiyo came to signify the elegant world of stylish pleasures. The novelist Asai Ryoi provided a definition in his 1661 novel Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo-monogatari): "Living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves, singing songs, loving sake, women and poetry, letting oneself drift, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current."
It is this era as well that witnessed the creation of ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world," the splendid genre painting of the urban bourgeoisie. It is remarkable how this near tidal wave of hedonism could have ushered in a cultural and artistic current of a strength equal to that of classical Japanese arts. Yet like the latter traditions ukiyo-e is quintessentialy Japanese.
Thanks to the art of printing, ukiyo novels and images eventually were to find their way to the citizens. The first publication with woodcut illustrations in the purely Japanese style of the Tosa school was the 1608 edition of the Tales of Ise (Ise-monogatari). These illustrations are attributed to the versatile Honami Koetsu, who designed the calligraphic models for the type, which was partly movable.
This publication became a model for commercial book production in the urban centers.
Around the middle of the 17th century, a new ukiyo literature and imagery began to enter the book market. Featuring heroes modeled on city dwellers, this new line celebrated the chic diversions of urban pleasure districts, the theater, festivals and travels. Guidebooks were also popular, and illustrated what was considered worth seeing in both town and countryside.
Around 1670, there appeared works by the first ukiyo-e master from Edo whose name has been recorded: Hishikawa Moronobu. Moronobu shaped the graphic style of the printed picture. Like almost all other subsequent woodcut artists, he also worked in polychrome painting. Although woodcuts came to have their own distinctive style, it was one nourished by fashion and novelty. Thriving on what was in vogue and on the latest ideas, the woodblock print possessed its own formal aesthetic and had no spiritual relationship with trends in classical painting. From decade to decade, changes in ukiyo-e subjects and drawing styles were largely a function of the changing technology of printing.
Specialisation evolved as one artist devoted himself to pillow pictures, another concentrated on pictures of women and nature while a third satirised fashions and others developed the style of theatre prints..
In Edo, Masanobu and in Kyoto, Sukenobu were using flowing, expressive brushwork in woodcuts to depict not only women of all classes, but also a range of historical and vernacular subjects. Powerful and of great force, these pictures are drawn with tremendous precision and reveal the hands of painters indifferent to the limitations of the new printmaking technique. Between 1711 and 1785 the first perspective pictures (uki-e) were also put on the market by Masanobu, who experimented with Western-style receding perspective in woodblock prints.
In 1741-42, the first two-color prints as single-sheet woodcuts were issued. A technique of rapid printing was developed by the publisher Emiya for use in prints based on several blocks; it employed registration marks (kento) to insure the accuracy ot the final image.
The artistic challenge of the new technology was met initially by Suzuki Harunobu with his calendar prints of 1764-65. Katsukawa Shunsho, a contemporary of Harunobu. became a drawer of woodblock prints only in his later years. From 1767 on, his portraits of actors (nigao-e) were successfully drawn from live models on stage. While in the time of the Torii masters, portraits of actors bore names and descriptions identifying only stereotypical figures, Shunsho and Mori Buncho no longer required such appellations as the actors they portrayed were recognisable in face and figure.
During the 1770s, Isoda Koryusai, a student of Harunobu, initiated an austere type of courtesan portraiture with realistic proportions. In his sequence of young courtesans in designer dresses, he, in fact, established models for fashion in the world of elegance; for it was at this time that even ladies began to dress themselves according to the latest whim in the vogues of the Yoshiwara.
Koryusai portrayed women as well as animals and plants, but only rarely depicted actors. It was with his work that the woodblock print achieved its "classic style," for his figures appear to be alive, despite the fact that, like other woodcut artists of his day, he had probably never engaged in anatomical studies. He used models from the world of the lower middle classes, transposing them into an idealized sphere of aristocratic elegance and beauty.
Toshusai Sharaku's portraits of actors truly succeed, for the first time, in portraying a subject's distinctive inner character. Around the same time, with great formal economy, Utamaro also created intensely expressive portraits of women. The unsurpassed quality of prints from 1780 to 1797 is due, for the most part, to the publisher Tsutaya Jusaburo, who held a magnetic attraction for the outstanding artists of his day. With Utamaro, nature prints came to life again. After 1780, he drew detailed insects, shells and birds for luxury editions of haiku anthologies. Demonstrating a talent for intent observation of nature, his pictures of plants and animals contrast markedly with the conventional designs of Koryusai. Strict anti-luxury laws introduced by the Shogun in 1790, limited previous liberties with regard to playful experimentation and alteration of stylistic conventions.
The pivotal point in the art of ukiyo-e came with Katsushika Hokusai, "the one obsessed with painting". He conclusively shifted the emphasis from personal portraiture to a depiction of nature. People in his pictures were unintentionally comic creatures going about their daily business. Hokusai began by creating landscapes in the spirit of ancient Japanese art; he went on to attain a new vision of nature. He was fascinated with European copperplate engraving, a technique which he had encountered in his studies. Through color shading and depth perspective, he strove for a new spatial reality. The results were strange, surrealistic creations of the imagination, which he soon surpassed. When more than sixty years old, Hokusai discovered a new kind of landscape drawing. Around 1831, he began to publish his "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" (Fugaku sanjurokkei),. his world-famous series of woodcuts. By this point, he was no longer copying but was instead achieving a complete freedom of stylistic means, drawing on Japanese, Chinese and European art.
Within a decade, Hokusai was to be surpassed as a landscape painter by Ando Hiroshige, who drew from nature. Following a journey along the Tokaido highway in 1832, Hiroshige portrayed the familiar environment of Edo and of Kamigata to the south. In this series, he revived the familiar territory of travel guides, representing stops along the way by means of painterly woodblock prints. Particular moods of the seasons, weather and time of day lend his landscapes a convincing closeness to nature. Kunisada (Nos. 54-56) and Kuniyoshi (Nos. 57-62) were his contemporaries in Edo. Kunisada for the most part used a highly conventional style, although his prints find many admirers nowadays, due to their striking posterlike coloring. In a series of surimono from the 1820s, dedicated exclusively to actors of the Ichikawa family, particularly Ichikawa Danjuro VII (1791-1858), Kunisada also demonstrated his capacity for more original designs. On the other hand, his contemporary and classmate, Kuniyoshi, became a great, courageous artist, displaying humor and a quality of generosity throughout his oeuvre. His masterful depictions of the hero and idiosyncratic landscapes intermingled European and Chinese formal conventions to explore the limits of graphic power, perspective, and the effects of light and shadow.
In 1842, as part of the Tempo reforms, pictures of courtesans, geisha and actors were banned, marking the demise of a subject matter that had already fallen from favour. Although both the Yoshiwara and illustrations of the courtesans experienced a revival after the period of the Tempo reforms, neither reached their earlier peaks of refinement. The social and political upheaval that characterised nineteenth-century Japan saw a change in artistic taste and direction that would relegate images of elegant Yoshiwara beauties to the distant past.
During the Kaei era (1848-1854), many foreign ships came to Japan. It was a period of unrest, a state of affairs reflected in the ukiyo-e of the time. Numerous pictures and caricatures were produced which alluded to the current situation in the country. Following the Meiji restoration in 1868, all kinds of cultural imports came to Japan from the West, photography and printing techniques being received with particular enthusiasm. As a result, the art of ukiyo-e went into decline in Japan. Its influence on European art was however dramatic. Van Gogh, for example, paid Hiroshige the compliment of imitation as can be seen in the following two examples.
Ukiyo-e is an art form with a history spanning more than three centuries. It developed as the bourgeoisie's own form of cultural expression, and is unique in the world. In the course of time, the style of ukiyo-e naturally underwent changes, as did the lives of the people with which these woodblock prints were closely linked. But from Japan they have travelled the world; unbeknown to their creators, ukiyo-e have had a profound influence on modern Western painting. With this in mind, we can still appreciate their great vitality today.
-www.ukiyoe-reproductions.com/html/history.html
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