my favorites

such an interesting bunch of studies the last couple of days, all instigated by something neil asked in the comments section of 'women and nature.' he wanted to know about the connections that may have brought elizabeth keith to the attention of watanabe shozaburo.

as it turns out, nobody had to have much in the way of connections to meet watanabe -- he was on the prowl. he pursued artists, western and japanese, by attending exhibitions, and by making himself known.

i just updated the labels on my library thing today; sometimes it surprises me how long i have been at this, and to what degree i haven't even known what i was looking at. so let's look again at watanabe, though it's true, we have met him before (and here too). because what this is all about is 'shin hanga,' and what shin hanga was all about was watanabe.

but first let's remind ourselves of the state of printmaking in japan at that time: the 'invasion' was nearly 50 years earlier; ukiyo-e had fallen out of fashion as painters from japan travelled to paris to study with matisse and monet. those left in japan with their printmaking skills had taken to producing pull-out illustrations for paperback novels. ukiyo-e was edo, and edo was over.

"Out of this general decline, a new art movement was born -- the shin hanga ("new prints") movement .... The concept of shin hanga was traditional and Japanese. The dogma was to keep the old way of creating a woodblock print in a highly specialized team of artist, carver, printer and publisher. In this team the artist made the design and at best supervised the work of the carvers and printers. The publisher was responsible for sales and the commercial success.

"In such a team the publisher was usually the decision maker. He had to pay the artist, the carvers and printers, and thus was geared for commercial success. The carvers and printers were on the lower side of appreciation and received less money for their work than the artist. However, in our view they were the ones with the highest degree of artisan skill.

"These shin hanga teams added some modern Western features to traditional Japanese subjects. The essential feature was the use of light and shadow. The Japanese had learned this from the French impressionists. Another Western feature was perspective. The third and probably decisive factor for shin hanga was their sales concept. It was catered from the beginning for export of the prints to North America and Europe. In plain words, the prints were designed and created in a way that should please foreigners. Shin hanga images show beautiful landscapes with an intact nature, geishas in kimonos on their way home under a full moon, fishing boats sailing under a red sky, and above all that majestic Mount Fuji in the background. Critics of shin hanga come up with the reproach that the world shown on shin hanga images was one that had ceased to exist a long time ago.

"Shin hanga was not an art movement founded by a group of artists. When we speak of shin hanga we must mention one man -- Shozaburo Watanabe, 1885-1962. He was everything for shin hanga: the founder, the driving force and mentor of the movement. At a very young age Mr. Shozaburo Watanabe had established his own print shop. In the beginning his core business was the production of reproductions that he exported to the U.S.A and Europe.

"Mr. Shozaburo Watanabe had a keen and rigid business sense, and a feeling what could sell in Western markets. He began to give commissions to a group of artists for designs of modern woodblock prints. In the beginning he cooperated with Western artists living in Japan like the Austrian Fritz Capelari. He thought that only a Western artist was able to make a design attractive to foreigners. But soon Japanese artists became the supporting pillar for Mr. Watanabe's export business." 1

"In 1915, Watanabe was looking for new artists to revitalize the art of woodblock prints. No longer satisfied with his work with Takahashi Shotei [his first artist], he wanted to work with an artist who could paint Japanese scenes in a realistic Western style. That spring, he noticed Capelari's watercolors in a Japanese department store exhibition. Watanabe was impressed and contacted Capelari, hoping to arrange a collaboration." 2

he would follow through this process, visiting exhibitions, then soliciting the western artists to work with him, with numerous others. not all works published in this way was of scenes in japan; elizabeth keith and cyrus baldridge, for example, were more likely to paint scenes from china than of japan. in addition to capelari, there were also bertha lum and charles bartlett. additional japanese artists to work with watanabe were yoshida hiroshige, kawase hasui, ohara koson, goyo, and many others. the artists brought him paintings, and he made magic of them.

and folks for all my books, it's not until now did i realize how these artists, the ones who have been my favorites for decades, were designed to be just that: MY FAVORITES! me: a westerner. all of my favorite japanese artists were doing work designed to be western! (hiroshige left watanabe after only a few prints, and he continued to work to perfect what he saw as his fine art.)

do i care do i feel 'duped'? well, maybe for a second or two. then i life my eyes, to shotei, or kawase, or keith, and i am enwrapped in awe once again.

under the yum yum tree

the thing is, is that other than matthew perry and his black ships, there is no linear path to what happened in the arts after japan was deisolationized.

today's post started because i finally got around to asking jean at her incredible flickr destination who the artist was for this lovely little print. she didn't know, but i realized it was credited to treadway, and was able to track it down.

it's by lilian miller, the only one of the western printmakers who was actually born in japan (her father worked at the american consulate).

i like it, and don't feel that way about the work of all of the western printmakers who went to study the practice in japan. and i'm not exactly sure why, which is why i wanted to do this post, to feel my way there.

why do they, for example, not look japanese? why do they repeat the same themes and subjects so often, and in such similar ways? the one hokusai drawing is perhaps the only image i could come across that is quite like that, yet with the work of the westerners, the work is indistinguishable from one artist to the next.

sadly, some of the answer is stuff we've heard before. even among those who had gone out of their way to move to japan to study, there was a sense of superiority over the 'charming quaintness of the environment,' as hyde put it. 'the japanese people are so lacking in physical beauty themselves that they must compensate for their deficiencies.' 1

with this sense of distance from their surroundings, art became more about form than content, copying rather than creating, illustrating instead of making art. lum and hyde were financially successful with their work, and that was the intent they pursued, creating commercially viable products, and even promoting them as such.

this attitude was not shared by all of the new students of this ancient art, as we will see in forthcoming posts.

for more check this out

women and nature

(and to finish off our series of (mostly) american women printmakers,
i offer you....)

“I am thinking of the communion I felt as a child in the Sierra under trees or in fields of wildflowers. I told no one what I felt. In my small world, no one referred to mystical experience, even in the church I attended.

I had not yet read Emerson, nor had I heard the story of how, as a young man, when John Muir discovered a cluster of rare orchids, called Calypso borealis, growing by the edge of an icy pond, deep in the outback of Ontario, he sat down and wept for joy, feeling that he ‘was in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come.’”

Susan Griffin 1

from HOUSE of STONE and SONG

Because we live in a country where
no one I know
sings to God in the streets,
I’m given to wandering past margins of fern and wild honeysuckle,

following the burr of the tanager, that lazy, drowsy
dozy buzz of triple notes
tied close together. I’m tethered and led, legato,

deeper in, beyond cedar field and hardscrabble, through
grapevine, bullbrier,
gloves of rhododendron and laurel lamp-lighting my way

over Indian graves and wetland, hellebore and hummock,
into the tall trees where
that flash of pure fire finds its high-branch summer niche.

Perhaps I want to be the crazy woman
who lives on roots and berries
in the only woods abandoned to her....

— Margaret Gibson 2

GENESIS

Far from the sea, the lilies grow
and listen for the sea.

Long ago, they bloomed near the shore,
and the small crustaceans,
red-backed crabs,
scurried under the pale exotic plants
that rocked on thin stems
half-flower, half-shell.

It’s a long way from the beginning.

The heavenly beasts appear in the sky,
unchanged
since the first seeds fell on the fields
in a green rain,
and men climbed from the water
on two legs,
unsteady as baby goats.

In the wind now
the white flowers rise and bend
in the grass, like the heads of sheep.
Behind the mountains
the waves rise and fall. The stars open.

No one has left the garden.

— Barbara Jordan 3

when the child was a child

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging.
It wanted the stream to be a river
the river a torrent
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child
It didn't know it was a child.
Everything was full of life, and all life was one.

When the child was a child
It had no opinions about anything.
It had no habits.
It sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair
and didn't make a face when photographed.

When the child was a child
it was the time of these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here,
and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Isn't life under the sun just a dream?
Isn't what I see, hear and smell
only the illusion of a world before the world?
Does evil actually exist,
and are there people who are really evil?
How can it be that I, who am I,
didn't exist before I came to be
and that someday
the one who I am
will no longer be the one I am?

When the child was a child
it choked on spinach, peas,
rice pudding
and on steamed cauliflower.
Not it eats all of those
and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child
it once woke up in a strange bed
and now it does so time and
time again.
Many people seemed beautiful then
and now only a few, if it's lucky.
It had a precise picture
of Paradise
and now it can only guess at it.
It could not conceive of nothingness
and today it shudders at the idea.

When the child was a child
it played with enthusiasm
and now
it gets equally excited
but only when it concerns
its work.

When the child was a child
berries fell into its hand as only berries do
and they still do now.
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw
and they still do now.
On every mountaintop it had a longing
for yet a higher mountain.
And in each city it had a longing
for yet a bigger city.
And it is still that way.
It reached for the cherries in the treetop
with the elation it still feels today.
It was shy with all strangers
and it still is.
It awaited the first snow
and it still waits that way.

When the child was a child
it threw a stick into a tree like a lance,
and it still quivers there today.

Peter Handke

seeing red by moonlight

okay so after yesterday's excursion into the universe of american printmakers, i found myself awed and engaged by this, and learned things i never knew. so beautiful, and she's one of my favorite printmakers.

but i found myself also thinking about the other thing i mentioned, and so i decided to go check out what old stinky-pants was up to.

i was again shocked and saddened by these crimes. if you want to see frances h gearhart, who, i ashamedly admit, i only just recently learned was not a man!, and the extraordinary beauty of her work, check this out.

listen to what this pretender says: " The American Arts & Crafts movement placed a significant emphasis on the home, and particularly on the quality and the individuality of the decorative elements placed in it. Equally important was the fundamental philosophical principle that equated living well with living simply and honestly. For this reason, the artists and craftsmen of the period sought to express these values in their designs while achieving the highest quality in their craftsmanship. . .ideals that were at odds with the developing mass production of the machine-driven Industrial Revolution. It is these artists’ commitment to quality and hand craftsmanship that has inspired me to create the works of art that I offer.

Each of my Arts & Crafts Collection images is based on extensive historic research of the styles of noted artists of the period, such as graphic designer Dard Hunter, potter Hannah Borger Overbeck, the California Plein Air painters and woodblock artists Bertha Lum, Frances Gearhart and Gustave Baumann. My artistic goal is to create images that incorporate the styles of these noted artists, while recalling the pictorial flatness and color intensity of the Japanese prints that were so popular and influential during the period. And my ultimate goal in creating this collection of period-inspired paintings and lithographs for the Arts & Crafts interior is to achieve the same high quality of craftsmanship that characterized the Craftsman ideal and to do so at an affordable price.

[My work] celebrates the extraordinary accomplishments of the California woodblock print artists, ca. 1900-1940. At the core of their artistic expression lay hand craftsmanship, from the carving of the printing blocks to the hand printing process on hand made paper. It is this level of hand craftsmanship that is the purest expression of the Arts & Crafts period as a whole. Hand craftsmanship is implicit in everything that the Arts & Crafts movement stood for at its genesis and still stands for today."

i wonder if tracing is a hand craftsmanship skill.

lastly, she goes on to say, "Also included with this work of art is an official Certificate of Authenticity, which is signed personally by A____ M______ on the date your work of art is produced. For your reference, a complimentary copy of the artist's biography is also included."

i'm telling you, i'll put up with quite many things, but you fuck with arthur wesley dow and i lose it.

guilding the lily

dorothy markert is a roycroft printmaker. the arts and crafts movement with its various names: mackintosh-style, liberty-style, and werkstatte-style among them, needs to have roycroft-style added to it.

to look at a clock designed by archibald knox, or mackintosh, or josef hoffmann, is to immediately recognize the single river running through the artisan guilds of the world; it is also to recognize the influence of japan on them all.

"Roycroft was a reformist community of craft workers and artists which formed part of the Arts and Crafts movement in the USA. Elbert Hubbard founded the community in 1895 in the village of East Aurora, Erie County, New York, near Buffalo. Participants were known as Roycrofters. The work and philosophy of the group, often referred to as the Roycroft movement, had a strong influence on the development of American architecture and design in the early 20th century.

The name Roycroft was chosen after the printers, Samuel and Thomas Roycroft, who made books in London from about 1650-1690. And beyond this, the word roycroft had a special significance to Elbert Hubbard, meaning King's Craft. King's craftsmen being a term used in the Guilds of the olden times for men who had achieved a high degree of skill -- men who made things for the King.

Elbert Hubbard's championing of the Arts and Crafts approach attracted a number of visiting craftspeople to East Aurora, and they formed a community of printers, furniture makers, metalsmiths, leathersmiths, and bookbinders."1

wonderfully for us all, guilds are reforming all over the world, including at roycroft. over the last several decades, the original roycroft buildings have been restored, and well, if you build it they will come. a community of craftspeople, artisans, have come together again, with a commitment to quality -- a commitment backed up with a peer review before one may use the roycroft mark on their work, and teach master classes on the campus.

and this is where we find dorothy markert. to browse her work, one instantly recalls margaret jordan patterson, edna boies hopkins, mable royds... but these are dorothy's alone. she brings what any artist brings: work that speaks from that place where hand and eye and heart meet.

there are many "craftspeople" in these days when we again appreciate the work of human hands over machines, but there are many of them from whom little original emerges. when they produce direct copies of the work of others and try to pass it off as their own, and a surprising number of people actually do this, the work may be charming, but is somehow hollow and leaden at the same time. perhaps dorothy took a master class of her own from the great legacy of the last century, but what she creates now, along with the other artisans on the roycroft campus, is art.

a happy interdependence day to us all

  Stars, still pond —
all night the white geese cry out
in your hand.

Coming, my eyes open.
How suddenly black
the tree trunks look in the rain.

Night quiets, cools.
Even now,
two boats on a single mooring,
we rise and fall on one breath, going on.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Because Tokugawa-period Japanese tended to regard the overall body shapes of men and women as nearly the same, the only significant physical marker of difference were the organs themselves.

By the 1660s, the first mass- produced woodblock prints began to appear, often in the form of pages illustrating of handbooks on .... We should bear in mind that these illustrated manuals were perfectly legitimate books in their day.

As has been pointed out, "these spring painting must be regarded in the light of seventeenth-century Japanese life and mores. --was considered a very natural function, and ways of increasing enjoyment of this function were felt to be more commendable than censurable."

Unlike the case in Europe, Japanese artists did not celebrate the figure in their work in any medium until the late Meiji period. Japanese popular art of the eighteenth century, detailed polychrome prints of famous beautiful women -- usually courtesans -- were much in demand. These prints emphasized the subtle, often elaborate facial features, gestures, long hair, and richly decorated clothing of these women to convey a sense of  beauty and power.

Its beak caught firmly
in the clam's shell
The snipe cannot fly away
On an autumn eveningUNKNOWN JAPANESE POET

"Few peoples," says Lane, "have ever pursued the cult of artistic spring painting as assiduously as the Japanese." (Images from the Floating World)

Tokugawa-period woodblock prints are generally called ukiyo-e 浮世絵, meaning "images of the floating world." Many people incorrectly think that the term ukiyo-e means spring painting images, probably because so many ukiyo-e were spring painting. But ukiyo-e encompass landscape scenes and a wide variety of non-spring painting themes.

Spring painting woodblock prints were most commonly known as spring painting春画, meaning "spring pictures." The word "spring" often means "youthful beauty" or "youthful vigor" in Japanese usage then or now. The sale of services, for example, is baishun 売春, "selling spring," which has a different emotive sense than the English term "prostitution." Similarly, the word "color" (iro 色 by itself, -shoku -色 in many compound words) often means spring painting or spring painting. (more)