Art: Japanese Print Revival

Time was when Japan’s cheap prints of almond-eyed prostitutes, grimacing kabuki actors and brawling porters were as popular as penny dreadfuls, and treated with no more regard. Few Japanese mourned their passing when they fell early victims in Japan’s Westernization drive, and it was left to European artists—Renoir, Monet, et al.—to recognize them as minor masterpieces of art. But today, spurred on by a growing group of artists who have revived the neglected art of printmaking, hanga (block-print picture) art is beginning to bloom again. Most recent international recognition: a first prize at Venice’s Biennale (TIME, July 9), awarded to the wild man of Japanese hanga artists, squat, myopic Shiko Munakata, 50, who also won a first prize in last year’s São Paulo Bienal.

“I Love That!” Fellow artists like to say that “Munakata is kamigakari—obsessed with God,” and at work Munakata vividly demonstrates why. Kneeling before his low work table with his broad rump in the air, he first squints nearsightedly at a sumi (black-ink) drawing he has pasted to a block of Judas-tree wood. Suddenly he seizes his chisel and, in a fury of motion, starts jabbing at the block, banging away with the mallet as the chips fly in all directions.

Sweat drenches his tousled black hair as he cleans the carved block, then splashes it with jet-black ink. Finally he selects a sheet of thin paper, carefully centers it on the block and begins pressing it with violent scrubbing motions. Cautiously peeling off the paper, he shouts: “Horete Iru!” (I love that!), then bursts into croaking laughter.

Divinities & Nudes. Munakata and his fellow hanga artists take for their subjects anything from nudes to Buddhist divinities, treat them in styles ranging all the way from medieval prints to posterlike realism. And in one important respect modern Japanese artists break sharply with the old print masters. Instead of merely drawing the designs for woodcuts, then handing them over to craftsmen to carve and print, Japanese printmakers today carry their hanga prints all the way through, from sketch to finished work. The result: a more expressive art form, bearing the stamp of individuality throughout the work.

Among Prizewinner Munakata’s leading fellow artists:

¶ Koshiro Onchi, who died last year at 64, pioneered in new techniques and materials, printing from wood blocks that incorporated anything from rubber heels and fish fins to leaves and string to get the textures he wanted.

¶ Kiyoshi Saito, 49 (TIME, Sept. 10, 1951), probably the biggest seller of the current wood-block artists, who earlier this year exhibited his work in a traveling U.S. show that went from Boston to San Francisco and Seattle. He frankly admits that he came to woodcuts through Gauguin, rocked Japanese art circles when the first São Paulo Bienal jury passed over Japan’s painting entries to award a prize to Saito (for a woodcut) and Tetsuro Komai (for an etching).

¶ Jun’ichiro Sekino, 41, whose carefully worked-over prints are currently on display at Chicago’s Art Institute, also meets the West halfway. His admitted influences include Whistler (“I worshiped him as God”) and Albrecht Dürer’s engravings (“such fineness of style, such detail”). Sekino, who was born on the cold northern tip of Honshu, is largely self-taught. He has found his happiest subjects in his children and a favorite Japanese print theme, the Japanese actors and puppet players (see cut) that toured war plants to boost morale during World War II.

“Really Japanese.” Shiko Munakata, himself currently having a one-man show at Tokyo’s Matsuya department store, is riding the crest of his recent international awards. In the first four days alone he took orders for 30 prints at prices ranging from $6-$55 each. His success is proof that the modern printmakers are catching on at home as well as abroad. More than 300 artists are now working in the medium, and even Tokyo’s Government Art Academy has begun teaching hanga again. Says Munakata: “The Japanese people are starting to look for something that’s really Japanese, that’s really a part of them.”