| |
|
|
 |
The History of Ukiyo-e Woodblock Printing
by Carol Dorman |
The 17th century was a period of immense change in Japan. The country was unified, peace was established, and an unprecedented age of prosperity began. Cities, in particular the new capital of Edo (now called Tokyo), flourished. A new, affluent, urban middle class became established. They had a taste for the finer things in life and patronized a variety of art forms, old and new. Soon the middle class began to take an interest in collecting art.
Books were already popular. Text and illustrations were carved onto wooden blocks and book pages were printed using a technique developed in China and introduced to Japan by Buddhist monks. By the latter 1600s this method of woodblock printing had been adapted for the production of individual works of art.
Among the upper classes, paintings by Kano school artists, which combined Chinese style brushwork with bright colours and Japanese subjects, were the most popular. Early print designers drew in a style that was a sort of fusion of the simple line drawings used in book illustrations and the Kano painting style. They called themselves yamato-e artists, or “Japanese picture” artists.
The pleasures of daily life, such as the theatre and the brothels, were the subjects of the new art, which soon came to be known as ukiyo-e, meaning “floating world pictures”. The concept of a “floating world” was a Buddhist one, referring to the painful and transitory nature of human life, but popular writers applied the term, tongue in cheek, to the world of popular fashions and sensual pleasures. Ukiyo-e illustrated this world and soon ukiyo-e style and subject matter had become inseparable. |
Beauties as artisans making woodblock prints, 1857
Woodblock print by Kunisada (1786-1865) |
Prints were published and sold by book publishers. Artists provided the designs, and engravers and printers employed by the publisher produced the prints. This image is a mitate, or parody. It depicts women in a printing studio doing work that in reality would have been done by men. In the bottom right, a young woman sharpens tools. The engraver above her has pasted an artist’s drawing to a wood block and is carving the design while a younger woman, probably her apprentice, removes wood from the blank area of another block. At the bottom left one woman applies sizing to paper while her assistant hangs it up to dry. A missing sheet showed the printer with her brushes and pigments. |
Beauty as Taoist sage Wang Tzu-ch’iao , c.1707
Woodblock print by Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764) |
| The early single-sheet woodblock prints were simple, black ink impressions on plain paper. Only one block was printed and colours, if desired, were painted in. One of the great, early masters of woodblock print design was Okumura Masanobu. He was the first to fully utilize humour and literary allusion. This image is another mitate, or parody. Educated Japanese at the time were familiar with classical Chinese literature, and Masanobu has posed his subject in imitation of the Chinese Taoist sage Wang Tzu-ch‘iao, who climbed Mount Sung and remained at the summit perfecting his transcendence for over 30 years until he ascended to heaven on the back of a white crane. |
Most prints were signed by the artist, but it was not uncommon for them to be unsigned. This design can be attributed to Toshinobu, who worked c.1717-1740s. It shows the Kabuki actor Sanjo Kantaro II in the role of the nurse, Yoshikane, in the play Choseiden Shiraga performed in1729. All Kabuki actors were male. Those who took female roles were called onnagata.
Prior to the introduction of separate blocks for printing colours, prints were often coloured by hand. This print is a fine example of hand colouring. Metallic sprinkles (probably brass) were used to give the actor’s kimono an extra rich feel. |
Sanjo Kantaro II as Yoshikane, 1729
Unsigned woodblock print |
|
Courtesan with Koto, 1770
Series: Beauties of the Green Houses
Woodblock by Harunobu (c1725-1770) |
In the 1740s colour blocks were introduced and one to three printed colours were added to ukiyo-e images.
In 1764-65 Harunobu was commissioned to design deluxe prints for some wealthy clients. Pigments were applied more heavily than in the past and additional colours were used. These were the first full colour prints, called nishiki-e, literally “brocade pictures”. The first commercially available nishiki-e prints by Harunobu were issued in 1766 and launched the golden age of Japanese colour woodblock prints. |
|
Scene from the story of Urashima , c.1807
Woodblock print by Hokusai (1760-1849) |
This is a scene from an old folk tale about Urashima, a fisherman who rescued a turtle and was rewarded by Princess Otohime with a visit to the Dragon King’s palace in the sea. The fisherman is sitting on the shore and Otohime and her attendants seem to float above the water.
Once full colour prints had been introduced, other deluxe printing techniques followed. One was karazuri, or embossing. This technique utilized a carved block for imprinting a pattern rather than transferring a pigment to the paper. In this design the ripples in the water, rather than being printed, are indicated by a wonderful, rich karazuri pattern (which unfortunately does not reproduce well).
This print is a letter sheet, or poem card. Letter sheets were similar to other ukiyo-e prints except that space was left at the top so that one could add their own letter or poem. Most of 18th and 19th century prints that have survived were made to be enjoyed and collected, but others, such as the letter sheets, were made with a function in mind. Some prints were intended to be used for decoration (pasted on fans for example) while others were parts of games, such as game boards or cut-out figures for children. |
Shinateru of the Okamoto House, c.1780s
Woodblock print by Utamaro (1753-1806) |
Ukiyo-e prints, sold individually or in sets, became mainstays of the popular culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. From the beginning of the genre, the most popular subjects were women, actors, and erotic scenes. Utamaro is considered to be the greatest master of bijin-ga, or pictures of beautiful women. Deluxe portraits were sometimes printed with backgrounds of ground mica, giving the print a rich, sparkly, jewel-like glow. This print has faded, but it once had intense colours and an opal-like mica background. |
|
Ukiyo-e artist’s favourite female subjects were the high-ranking courtesans who worked in the brothels of the licensed pleasure districts. In a world that valued pleasure and fashion, they were celebrities. They wore the most sumptuous kimonos and had the most stylish hairdos. They were trained in the arts and social graces and epitomized the cultural values of female beauty and refinement. This courtesan is almost ready to go out, but she has not yet changed into the high geta (platform shoes) that were part of her attire. People probably bought prints of beauties as much to see the latest fashions as for the woman portrayed. Just as clothing fashions changed, so fashions in art changed. Note how the style of portraying courtesans changes from Harunobu’s childlike figure to Utamaro’s fuller, more sensuous beauty, to Eisen’s more angular figure. |
Courtesan, c.1830
Woodblock print by Eisen (1790-1848) |
|
Nakamura Utaemon III as Sogo no Goro,
c.1820
Woodblock print by Toyokuni I (1769-1825) |
The most successful of the new forms of entertainment to develop in 17th century Japan was the Kabuki theatre and ukiyo-e evolved alongside it. The same artists who designed woodblock prints also frequently designed Kabuki sets and advertising signboards. Kabuki actors were the superstars of their day, adored by fans, much as Hollywood superstars are idolized today. Each time a play opened, publishers were quick to issue woodblock images of the actors in character.
Toyokuni was a prominent artist who specialized in designs of Kabuki actors and beautiful women. He was also a great teacher and his pupils dominated the field of ukiyo-e design throughout the 19th century. |
|
The 1830s was a pivotal decade for ukiyo-e. Artists had always illustrated a variety of subjects, such as nature, landscapes, ordinary people engaged in everyday activities, as well as characters out of literature, mythology, and history, but actors and courtesans had been by far the most popular subjects. This changed in the 1830’s as several innovative artists inspired the public to take a greater interest in other subject matter. |
Mandarin Ducks, 1847-48
Woodblock print by Hiroshige
(1797-1858) |
Birds, flowers, and animals (usually animals of the zodiac) had been drawn by many earlier artists, but these themes were popularized by Hokusai and Hiroshige in the 1830s. Nature studies and other decorative subject matter were frequently printed on unconventionally shaped paper and were often pasted onto fans or screens for decoration. The calligraphic brushwork so typical of Chinese-inspired Japanese painting is often more evident in nature studies than in designs of human subjects. Often the birds and animals had special meaning. For example, cranes and turtles symbolized longevity. Mandarin ducks were symbols of fidelity. |
|
| In the early days of ukiyo-e production, prints appeared in a variety of shapes and sizes, but there was a practical limit to the size of wood blocks that could be produced and easily handled. By the latter 1700s a standard large size, called oban, had become the most common size. While the measurements were never exact, oban was approximately 25 x 38cm or 10 x 15”. Smaller sized images were generally printed two or more to an oban sheet of paper, so that they were half the size of an oban, or one third the size, or one quarter the size, etc. When a larger image was desired, multiple sheets of paper were used. The following image is a triptych, printed on three separate oban sheets. |
Hosokawa Sada-uji seized by Kusunoki retainers Tsujikaze and Itamochi at the Battle of Fujidera, 1856. Woodblock print by Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) |
In the late 1820s one of Toyokuni’s pupils, Kuniyoshi, achieved popularity with his bold and expressive designs of famous warriors. Kuniyoshi was a master of composition, and of expressing mood and emotion. Here he has imagined the Battle of Fujidera (1348). Pouring rain is indicated by straight vertical lines and by the splashes on the ground. Woodblock prints proved to be an ideal medium for the depiction of snow and rain and these designs are among the most popular today.
Kuniyoshi popularized warrior print designs and many of his students continued to design prints in this genre.
Hiroshige did for landscapes what Kuniyoshi had done for warrior subjects. He travelled around the country, sketching places he visited, and created beautiful prints of country scenes for his fellow townspeople. He also illustrated many city scenes, primarily of Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. Hiroshige’s first landscape series came out in the early 1830s and he designed many more through the rest of his career. Many of his landscapes were among the best-selling prints of the 19th century. |
Takata Riding Grounds, 1857
Series: 100 Famous Views of Edo
Woodblock print by Hiroshige (1797-1858) |
As Hiroshige’s career progressed he began to experiment with composition and perspective, sometimes placing one large object in the immediate foreground, as he has in this picture of the Takata Riding Grounds on the northwest outskirts of Edo. In addition to riding, the samurai practiced their archery skills here. The round shape in the foreground is the target, and in the distance at center right are the archers. |
|
Kunisada was Toyokuni’s most successful student and he and his pupils dominated the field of actor portraits throughout the 19th century. This design is from an untitled series of actors, past and present. Kunisada planned this to be one of his greatest series (which it was), and the publisher’s best engravers and printers were assigned to it.
It was rare for anyone other than artist and publisher to receive credit on a print, but in this series the engraver is also credited. The printing is exceptional. There is embossing in the folds of cloth around the actor’s neck and on the flower, and the grain in the block used for the blue background has been allowed to show, giving it a lovely, rich texture. |
Sawamura Tossho as Karukaya, 1860
Woodblock print by Kunisada (1786-1865) |
|
Kintai Bridge, Iwakuni, 1859
Series:100 Famous Views of the Provinces
Woodblock print by Hiroshige II (1829-1869) |
All artists worked under art names, or pseudonyms. Most received their art name from their teacher upon “graduation”. Hiroshige II was given the name Shigenobu by Hiroshige I. It was customary for an artist’s best pupil to assume his name upon his death, so Shigenobu became Hiroshige II.
Here snow falls on Kintai Bridge. The grain of the block used for the lighter blue of the water has been allowed to show. A technique called bokashi, a gradation or blending of colour, has been used for the dark blue in the river. Bokashi is also used with a pale blue colour to show variation in the snow on either bank. The snow itself is not a printed colour, but simply sections of the paper left blank. |
|
Prior to the 1870s, most of the pigments used in woodblock prints were vegetable dyes and a few mineral pigments. In the latter 1850s Europeans began to manufacture synthetic colours, called analine dyes, creating new colours almost every year. These soon found their way to Japan and by the 1870s analine colours were being used for ukiyo-e. Vegetable colours were bright when printed, but tended to fade with constant exposure to light. Analine colours were brighter and more intense than the old pigments, and much more resistant to fading. |
"I want to sleep so badly", 1878
Series: A Collection of Desires
Woodblock print by Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) |
As the 19th century progressed, the high ranked courtesans began to lose some of their allure as subjects of ukiyo-e. Working women such as geisha (professional entertainers) and waitresses, as well as aristocratic ladies and ordinary housewives appeared more often in popular art. This design is from a series depicting modern women in contemporary settings.
Yoshitoshi, a pupil of Kuniyoshi, continued his teacher’s tradition of giving characters wonderfully expressive faces and poses, but he surpassed previous artists in his placement of his subjects, often showing them from unconventional angles. |
|
Yoshitoshi, like his teacher Kuniyoshi, produced vivid battle scenes bursting with energy, and both also created intimate studies of warriors that reflected their emotional state. This is Taira no Kiyomori (1118-81). He was known for his pride and his ruthless ambition. He showed no mercy to his enemies and exerted great power over the emperor. In 1180 Kiyomori began to lose his sanity, imagining that he was being haunted by ghosts, and in his hallucinations everyday objects turned into the skulls of his victims. The series, to which this design belongs, illustrates famous ghost stories and is easily distinguished by the unique, ragged, worm-eaten look of the print’s borders. |
Kiyomori sees hundreds of skulls at Fukuhara, 1890
Series: New forms of thirty-six ghosts
Woodblock print by Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) |
|
| In the latter part of the 19th century the culture that had produced the ukiyo-e print began to change rapidly. Trade with the Western world introduced new art styles and new technologies such as photography that competed with ukiyo-e in the marketplace. As the demand for traditional ukiyo-e waned, woodblock print artists and publishers had to find new subject matter and new markets. Some artists incorporated new stylistic elements, often inspired by Western art. Some produced decorative scenes of pretty women, or birds and flowers, or illustrations of traditional Japanese activities (the tea ceremony for example) that were intended as much for the foreign market as for domestic consumption. Some artists began to illustrate current events. |
Drowning woman saved, 1874
Woodblock print by Yoshiiku (1833-1904) |
In 1874 Yoshiiku, another pupil of Kuniyoshi, collaborated with the newspaper Tokyo nichinichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily News) to issue woodblock prints illustrating interesting news stories, an idea which was soon adopted by other publications. This newspaper supplement tells the story of a maid who was robbed on a bridge and thrown into the river, then rescued by a boatman. Yoshiiku has used the technique of overprinting for the girl in the water. The blues of the water are printed over the part of her that is submerged, creating a transparent quality. |
|
Scene from a Noh play: Shojo, The Orangutan and an Obedient Son, 1898
Woodblock print by Kogyo (1869-1927) |
Noh theatre is Japan’s classical theatre. It developed centuries before Kabuki and was patronized by the nobility. Ukiyo-e artists rarely illustrated it as it was not popular among the general public. Kogyo was the first artist to focus extensively on Noh as subject matter and he produced several large print series illustrating scenes from Noh plays. This series is distinguished by various deluxe printing techniques, including the silver metallic pigment used for highlights on the actor’s elaborate costume and for the ladle on top of the large jar. Stylistically, Kogyo has strayed from traditional ukiyo-e. His compositions are rather stiff, reflecting the more formal Noh Theatre, but at the same time there are playful elements such as the side of the paper appearing to lift up to reveal the orangutan underneath.
Kogyo was one of the generation of artists who’s career spanned the period, at the beginning of the 20th century, during which ukiyo-e art was replaced by newer forms of woodblock print art. |
All images courtesy: Stuart Jackson Gallery, 108a Cumberland St., Toronto, ON
Return to top
|
Kurosaki Akira: artist, envoy and educator
By Rebecca Salter
For well over a century, the Japanese woodblock print has maintained a special hold over the western imagination and it is usually the subjects depicted that first draw interest. There is a powerful and perhaps inevitable fascination with a world that appears so different from our own. The charges of naive exoticisation of the ‘other’ are probably well deserved and sit within the context of a western ‘japonisme’. But for some westerners, artists in particular, it is not only the content but the minutiae of the woodblock method itself which appeal. Although Europe too had a woodblock tradition, the fine lines and dense, flat colour of Japanese woodblock provoked particular interest. Until woodblock craftsmen arrived in the West to impart their knowledge, the riddle of the production of Japanese prints had to be solved through trial and error.
Japanese paper was and is fundamental to the success of the print and there were collections of Japanese paper in the west available for study, but it was achievement of flat colour and the registration system that proved to be the most impenetrable secrets. To unravel these mysteries, over the last century Japanese woodblock printers and carvers have travelled to the West to impart their knowledge. Kurosaki has been one of these emissaries.
The role is not an easy one - the teacher needs not only to have superb technical and artistic skills of his own but he also has to be able to appreciate the part of the process that non-Japanese artists had found hardest to fathom, and to impart his knowledge based on an understanding of both cultures. Over time, the pupils become teachers themselves and ambassadors for the technique.
Frank Morley Fletcher’s book, ‘Woodblock Printing by the Japanese Method’ was first published in 1915 and much reprinted thereafter. He can really be credited for laying the foundations of the teaching of Japanese woodblock, first in Britain and then in America. The arrival of the woodblock printer Urushibara Mokuchu (1888-1953) in England in 1908 to demonstrate at the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition would have given British artists their first chance to see prints executed by a master. He remained in Europe until 1934 working with both European and expatriate Japanese artists, and doing his own work.
One such artist who came into contact with this teacher, was the British born Canadian, Walter J Phillips (1884–1963). Phillips became a superb practitioner in the art of Japanese woodblock himself. In his own book on the subject, ’The Technique of Colour Woodblock’, published in 1926, Phillips makes the distinction between woodblock artists who employed the medium as a means of reproduction, and those few artists who appropriated its materials and aesthetic qualities as a means to facilitate their artistic vision. Urushibara in fact, was one he admired for his more original work.
Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950), an artist who came to print later in life after experience in the West as a painter, became an important go-between in America through teaching and even more through promoting Japanese prints abroad and Western artists’ work in Japan. As a result of the work of these early teachers, groups of artists emerged who straddled both eastern and western traditions and without doubt enriched the development of woodblock.
The development of Kurosaki’s career as a teacher both in Japan and abroad is one founded on an artistic approach to the medium. It spans a particularly delicate but also vibrant time in Japan’s history. Just 8 years old at the end of World War Two, Kurosaki was of the generation that had to shoulder the responsibility of rebuilding Japan and her reputation and re-establishing her place on the international stage. Born in Manchuria, he was one year old when he returned to live in Kobe, which was one of Japan’s more outward looking cities. In his work there is a constant thread of exploration around Japan’s place within both the Asian tradition and the wider international scene. This quest for an Asian context for his own work existed in counterpoint to other influences, such as his love for the strength and depth of German and North European painting.
Although he continued to study painting through college, wanderings through the backstreets of Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto, led him to discover the allure of traditional ukiyo-e woodblocks. He was hooked by prints he found in second-hand bookshops, and soon after graduation he set about finding the carvers and printers still at work and learning from them. The more he uncovered the collaborative roots of the woodblock tradition, the more he began to question the style favoured by artists of the Sosaku Hanga, who produced their own prints. He was particularly drawn to the nineteenth century artists such as Kuniyoshi, Kunisada and the sometimes bizarre Yoshitoshi. Establishing a collaborative way of working with a printer, his own work became increasingly complex. He became known for bold, saturated colours printed directly up against each other without the traditional woodblock outline.
The 1970s proved to be a pivotal decade, not only for his work but also for his teaching. In his own prints he was combining woodblock with other techniques such as silkscreen, collagraph, and photo relief. He was beginning to test the boundaries of woodblock.
Furthermore, it was around this time that he made a conscious decision to become proficient in English. He could see that for artists with this skill, the horizons were much wider. Aged 34 he was given a grant by Bunkacho (Japanese Ministry of Culture) to study in the US in 1973 and by 1975/6 he was already a visiting lecturer at Morley College in London. For more than 3 decades, Kurosaki has continued to be active in traveling abroad to lecture and demonstrate all aspects of woodblock printmaking, from the perspective of an artist.
From my point of view however, it was Kurosaki’s welcome in Kyoto that was so important. I had arrived in Japan with a love of the prints and a rather naive desire to learn how to make them, but no real idea how I was going to achieve this. I was stunned to find that the art school I was studying in did not teach woodblock but I was rescued from this disappointment by Kurosaki’s generosity in taking on ‘stray’ pupils. Many foreign students in Japan will be familiar with the stress of trying to balance the pressures of visas/scholarships/making a living and finding a way of studying what you want to study knowing full well that circumstances are unlikely to allow you the traditional timescale of a proper apprenticeship. To find a teacher prepared to teach a foreign student working within those constraints is a real blessing and perhaps the greatest testament is that so many of Kurosaki’s pupils are now themselves involved in teaching woodblock in some way.
With declining fortunes for the system of traditional craftsmen in Japan, it is the international print practitioners who may have a role to play , not only in preservation of the technique, but also in the development of its expressive potential. Chemical and solvent-free, Japanese water-base woodblock printmaking has much to offer in a world increasingly concerned with environmental and ecological factors. This deserves to be better understood. As Kurosaki moves from university responsibilities to a well-earned opportunity to focus on his own work, it is perhaps the turn of his former pupils to maintain his passion and vision and ensure a future for Japanese-style woodblock.
Return to top
|
|
|
