Vision of a Moment: Japanese Prints 1950–1960
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
28 January – 18 September 2022
The Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition Vision of a Moment: Japanese Prints 1950-1960 (28 January – 18 September 2022) showcases forty Japanese prints that were presented to the museum by the Japanese government in 1961, to celebrate the founding of the museum’s Eastern Art Department. The gift mostly consists of Creative Print works (sōsaku hanga) that were produced in the 1950s and early 1960s by artists such as Saitō Kiyoshi, Munakata Shikō, and Komai Tetsurō. These works deploy a diverse range of printing techniques, for example hand-colouring, lithography, etching, mezzotint, and woodblock.
The Ashmolean’s exhibition offers a corrective to recent UK exhibitions which have neglected Creative Prints and instead focused on nineteenth-century ukiyo-e prints. Such exhibitions include York Art Gallery’s Pictures of the Floating World: Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints (28 May 2021 – November 2022); the British Museum’s Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything (30 September 2021 – 30 January 2022); and the Royal Academy of Arts’ Kyōsai: Israel Goldman Collection (19 March – 19 June 2022).[1]
The Creative Print Movement began with Yamamoto Kanae’s woodblock Fisherman (1904). Here, Kanae deployed for the first time the ‘self-design, self-carve, self-print’ method that embodies the essence of the movement.[2] With this method, Kanae rejected the tradition of ukiyo-e, according to which prints were produced by a team of artisans under the direction of a publisher who was often driven by commercial interests. Creative Print artists instead pursued modernist ideals, claiming that printmaking should contribute to an artist’s technical innovation, originality, and self-expression. To foreground their authorship, Creative Print artists often wrote the title, artist signature, and print number at the bottom of their prints. The action of carving and printing is often reflected in the final image, as can be seen in Sasajima Kihei’s woodblock Wind in the Forest (1959), which is included in Vision of a Moment. Kihei suffered from pleurisy and so he was unable to apply even pressure to woodblocks. Instead, Kihei developed his own printing method which, as can be seen in this print, created a wrinkly effect on the cut-away areas of his prints.[3]
The efforts of Creative Print artists bore fruit in the 1950s, when they won several major prizes at international art events. At the São Paulo Biennale in 1951, for example, first prize was awarded to Saitō, whose colour woodblock print Kyoto Wall (B) (1960) appears at the beginning of the exhibition. This print renders architectural structures in Kyoto using an interplay of subdued charcoal, ash, and burnt orange and vertical and horizontal lines which evoke Piet Mondrian’s grid compositions. Towards the middle of the exhibition is Prints of Song (1956) by Munakata, who was awarded first prize at the São Paulo Biennale in 1955 and the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1956. In contrast to most of the prints included in the exhibition, which are abstract works with some figurative elements, this set of four woodblocks with hand colouring stands out for its distinctive folk-art style and narrative elements. The set illustrates the waka poems of the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Munakata’s sharply carved-out and fragmentary lines, filled with warm and glossy yellow, red, blue, and purple pigments, take the form of women, mermaids, goddesses, and dandelions.
Towards the end of the exhibition is Komai’s etching with aquatint Vision of a Moment (1950) (Fig. 1), the only prize-winning work displayed in the exhibition.[4] This print has a pronounced grainy effect which the artist used as a vehicle for visualising soft light particles. With this luminous element, the work presents a mesmerising image filled with abstract, dreamy, and otherworldly forms whose presence flickers on and off before us. Abstract shapes dominate the image but houses with lit windows and other forms can be deciphered at the bottom of the composition. With these components, the artist, it seems, tries to unmask the ordinary surface of reality, revealing a surreal universe hidden in everyday objects.
The works included in the exhibition vary in size, style, and subject matter, giving the impression that there is no unifying theme. However, they do share certain traits. Prints such as Kawanishi Hide’s colour woodblock Taisanji in Autumn (1955) and Kawakami Sumio’s woodblock with handcolouring Nanbanesque Behaviours (1955) embrace an identifiable hybridisation of Japan and the west. This hybridity is to an extent symptomatic of the post-war political climate in Japan, in which the US sought to democratise the war-torn country and establish political and cultural ties with Japan.[5] Crucial to this mission was Oliver Statler, a civilian employee of the US army whose book Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn (1956) represents a major contribution to the success of post-war Creative Prints.[6] Some of the prints reproduced in this book are also on display in the exhibition.[7]
Instead of foregrounding the historical context of Creative Prints, the curators of Vision of a Moment chose to draw the audience’s attention to the print artists’ technical maturity and creative flair for an artform which in Japan had long been considered inferior to painting and sculpture.[8] It is telling that the exhibition adopts the title of Komai’s print Vision of a Moment, a genuine tour de force that boasts Komai’s matured artistic concept and mastery of etching techniques. In this respect, the exhibition speaks to what Creative Print artists hoped to achieve – inscribing their artistic ego on printing plates, receiving acknowledgement for their works based on artistic self-expression, and elevating the print medium to a true art form.
Citations
[1] Several exhibitions in London have mentioned or included Creative Prints. For example, the Queen’s Gallery’s Japan: Courts and Culture (8 April 2022 – 12 March 2023) and the Brunei Gallery’s Lu Xun’s Legacy: Printmaking in Modern China (20 January – 19 March 2022).
[2] Mai Fujimura, ‘Jungil panhwaundongui sanghoyeonghyange gwanhan gochal, ruswinui mokgagundonggwa jeonhu ilbonui minjungpanhwaundongeul jungsimeuro’ (‘A Study on the Interaction Between the Woodblock Printing Movements of China and Japan, With a Focus on the People’s Print Movement in Japan and Lu Xun’s Woodcut Movement’), Gichojohyeonghagyeongu (Journal of Basic Design & Art) 16, no. 6 (2015), 789-801, 792, uci: G704-001069.2015.16.6.043 (Accessed 7 April 2022, https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART002073520).
[3] ‘Sasajima Kihei no shōgai’ (‘The Life of Sasajima Kihei’), Akio Uozu (n.d., accessed 19 August 2022, http://uozu.sakura.ne.jp/asahi8.htm), originally published in Asahi choritsu furusato bijutsukan (ed.), Seitan 100nen kinen: Sasajima Kiheiten (The Sasajima Kihei Exhibiton: The 100th Anniversary of Birth) [exhib. cat.] (Toyama: Asahi choritsu furusato bijutsukan, 2005), n.p.
[4] The original Japanese title (Tsuka no ma no gen’ei) is often translated as Momentary Illusion. I adopt the title Vision of a Moment because this title was used at the original Ashmolean exhibition in 1962.
[5] Alicia Volk, ‘Japanese Prints Go Global: Sōsaku Hanga in an International Context’, in Alicia Volk and Helen M. Nagata, Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement [exhib. cat.] (Milwaukee, Wis.: Milwaukee Art Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 2005), 6.
[6] Volk, 8-9; Oliver Statler, Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn (Rutland, Vt.; Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1956).
[7] For example, Shinagawa Takumi’s Ghost Story (1955); Kawakami Sumio’s Arrival of the Portuguese (1952) and Nanbanesque Behaviour (1955); Maeda Masao’s Big Haul Net (1941); and Kitaoka Fumio’s Ship at Anchor (1952). See Statler, Modern Japanese Prints, figures 50, 59, 60, 77, and 86.
[8] Volk, 7.