I keep discovering new printmakers I like, but I already have so many I love. I’ve decided I will not do more than one day of the same artist in a week, but I’m not hesitating to come back to some of my favorite artists every week. I’ve shown some of Bosman’s color prints before (1, 2, 3)–he tends to utilize a very limited palette of colors within one print, which, like most constraints on an artistic form, actually opens up interesting possibilities. This gives his pictures a pretty distinctive feel, and I feel it’s not too hard to identify things by him just by looking.
Today’s print is called The Edge; the bridge does come to an abrupt stop, creating an edge, but what’s the metaphor? Is it implying the edge of the city? the edge of “civilized society”?
In addition to landscapes and especially seascapes, you may have noticed an unusual number of night scenes. I can’t say why I like them so much, but there you go. Another Japanese print from the Shin-Hanga period (modern revival of ukiyo-e, classic Japanese woodcuts) by Koitsu, a print of whose I showed back in week 1! And it was also a night scene, though a moonlit one. Today’s print is a night scene without the moon showing, either directly or by reflection. The only light visible in the print is reflection from the city and from a boat on the water. An atmospheric piece, with colors attenuated by the darkness, but oh so lovely.
Midnight Scene at Atami (Tsuchiya Koitsu, 1935, woodcut)
Katsushita Hokusai (1760-1849) is perhaps the best known Japanese printmaker in history thus far. Much of his fame comes from the iconic print Great Wave off Kanagawa, which is part of a well-known series of prints entitled Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji (though in fact, the series contains 46 prints), which were intensely popular during the artist’s lifetime and remain so. Mount Fuji was a landmark of great importance, and many artists include Fuji in visual works.
Today’s print is entitled “A view of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa in Shinano province”. Not only is this print beautiful, but it illustrates some interesting aspects of the production of traditional ukiyo-e woodcut print art. Most commonly, the artist would create an original drawing of the scene on thin paper. The drawing would be glued to a block of wood, and a separate artisan (the woodcarver) would carve out the pattern in the woodblock, destroying the drawing in the process, of course. Then the woodblock would be turned over to a printer for production. For color prints, several woodblocks would be carved, one corresponding to each color in the picture, and they would be printed serially onto individual pieces of paper.
It was pretty common for printmakers to start with a simple color scheme and see how the public liked the picture. If it was popular, they might carve additional blocks to add more colors (and usually had to further carve the original blocks to accomodate the added colors.) This print began life with a mostly blue color scheme, but as it was quite popular, Hokusai reworked it to incorporate a broader palette.
As if that wasn’t complicated enough, often after many printings and/or many years, woodblocks would degrade or break. When that occurred, if additional impressions were desired, someone (often not the original artist) would carve a new block to match the originals.
I am presenting two versions of this print–one printed in 1830 from the original blocks (among the earliest editions, albeit after the color palette had been broadened), and a reproduction (new block carved and printed in 1930, with a fairly different color scheme.) In addition to the differences in the color scheme, the older print seems (to my eye) to show finer details.
A view of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa in Shinano province (1830) (1930)
Hale Woodruff was an African-American artist, much of whose work was about conveying the African-American experience. I featured one of his prints, “By Parties Unknown” on day 3 of week 1–a disturbing but important aspect of the black experience in the US. The topic of today’s print is a happier one–jazz music as an expression of African-American culture. I find this print of an accordion player resonates for me. We don’t see an audience–perhaps for this musician, an audience is not why he plays.
Some artists of the shin-hanga period (revival of uikiyo-e traditional woodblock prints in the late 19th and early 20th century) studied Western painting, and the work of those artists is very interesting. Today’s print is by Kawase Hasui (1883-1957), who petitioned the Japanese printmaker Kaburagi to become his apprentice, and was told to go study Western style painting. After a couple of years of that training, he returned to Kaburagi and was accepted and trained in the tradition of ukiyo-e. His name Hasui was given him by his master Kaburagi, and means “water gushing from a spring”.
The print actually feels more like a Japanese-inflected Western picture, but no matter how you describe it, it is lovely. It actually reminds me of the Stow Wengenroth print Cool Forest, featured last week.
Nikko Kaido (1930) [Road from Edo (Tokyo) to Nikko]
I wrote a long post a couple of weeks ago about the artist Antonio Frasconi, with a print that I didn’t really love but featured because I love his social justice thrust. Today, I want to share another print by the same artist, which I do love both for its visual appeal and for its subject. It’s a woodcut portrait of Walt Whitman, who died years before Frasconi was born, but whom the young Uruguayan read passionately. The depth of Frasconi’s affinity for Whitman can be judged by the fact that he made at least 8 separate portrait prints of Whitman that I can locate, most of them included in a book of Whitman’s writings Frasconi assembled titled A Whitman Portrait (1960). I haven’t read a lot of Whitman, but I have been struck deeply by what I have read, in particular this passage from Leaves of Grass, his signature work.
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem….
Here’s the print of Whitman that I like best, which is from the page opposite the title page of the book:
Richard Bosman was the first printmaker I featured when I started this endeavor a month or so ago. He does woodcuts, screenprints and monoprints as well as paintings. He uses bold colors but most of his prints feature a limited palette, often limited to variations of a single color. I chose today’s print of a waterfall as on our vacation this summer we spent time in upstate New York looking at several gorgeous waterfalls. This one is entitled Buttermilk Falls, but there are numerous falls with that name, so I’m not sure which one it is. We don’t need to know that in order to enjoy it, of course.
Given that it’s been a rainy day here, I thought a print of a rainy day would be appropriate. The Japanese ukiyo-e artists depicted weather a lot–wind, rain, snow–with sudden downpours an especially common feature. As in haiku, nature and the natural environment is very important. This print, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake, by Hiroshige, was created in 1857, as part of the famous series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. (Edo was the older name for the city of Tokyo.) Bridges were very common in Hiroshige’s prints. This particular print is one of the better known of Hiroshige’s works, and was copied in oil paints by Van Gogh (See below). I love this print like so many of the ukiyo-e scenes, because it’s very evocative–I feel like I can be in the picture.
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake, by Hiroshige
Samella Sanders Lewis (born 1924) is an incredible figure. She started at Dillard and then moved to Hampton Institute, earning her bachelor’s degree. She continued her education at OSU, earning a masters and then her PhD in art history and cultural anthropology in 1951 (first African American woman to do so). She became the first Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Florida A&M University. Lewis has taught at a number of colleges and universities, and is currently on the faculty of Scripps College, which is part of the Claremont consortium in California. She founded and served as first curator of the Museum of African American Art in LA. She is a renowned artist, best known for her prints (lithographs, screen prints, woodcuts and linocuts), but also a painter.
Today’s print has tested my art history detective skills and found them sorely lacking. I find online images dated 1968, 1969, and 2006, and it is described variously as a woodcut or a linocut. My attempted reconstruction/hypothesis is that the original block was cut in the late 60s (’68 or ’69) and was a linocut, and that she redid it as a woodcut in 2006. Why? Perhaps the original block was lost, and there was demand for more impressions? My limited Internet skills were unable to go further than this. I am so curious to learn more.
When I closely examine different images found online with different dates in the captions (as well as handwritten on the print itself by the artist), I find small variations. (It feels like those children’s games–“circle 10 differences between these two pictures.”) These could be related to wear on a single original block, reprinted after a lapse of many years; or to variations in inking; or as I hypothesize above, to creation of a new block attempting to reproduce the old.
The print itself? The recorded title is either Prophet or Modern Day Prophet. I have not been able to find specific history or commentary on this piece. I look at that face and see sadness, experience, perhaps wisdom. It again amazes me how evocative a combination of black lines and white background can be. What do you see?
Tuesday’s print: After yesterday’s profound downer, today is a day for simply a pretty picture. Tsuchiya Koitsu was a Japanese printmaker active at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. He was an important part of the Shin-Hanga movement–a sort of Ukiyo-e revival. (Ukiyo-e was the classical period of woodblock prints in Japan from late 17th to early 18th century. This style fell out of fashion from the mid 18th century until the Shin-Hanga period in the late 19th. Ukiyo-e literally means “floating world”, as the classical period included many pictures of a sensual lifestyle featuring courtesans. Shin-hanga just means “new prints”.) Koitsu was quite prolific , and I love many of his prints, so I had a hard time choosing one for today. He has done a number of moonlit scenes. In the end, I selected Moonlit Evening at Osaka Castle. I expect I will return to Koitsu and show some of his other lovely prints in the future.
