The art of Japanese woodblock printing

Van Gogh owned a copy of Utagawa Kunisada’s woodblock print of the ‘Yoshiwara Poet Omatsu’ (1861), which is currently on display at the Watts Gallery. It depicts the poetess who rose from humble origins in an elegant kimono at her dressing table and was part of Kunisada’s series of paintings titled Biographies of Famous Women, Ancient and Modern, but Van Gogh may not have known that. By the time he started amassing Japanese prints – he splurged on 600 of them in the winter of 1886 – they had become collectibles sought after by avant-garde artists for their clear lines, bright colours and the immediacy of their cropped figure compositions anticipating photography.

It’s a paradox of art history that a nation closed to the outside world for centuries should, on opening to international trade in 1854, have become a beacon of modernity. Japanese woodblock printmakers of the Edo period were avant-garde avant la lettre. If you want proof, visit the Watts Gallery’s exhibition of late Ukiyo-e prints and compare them to the contemporary canvases of its Victorian founder GF Watts.

The prints are from the collection of European art historian Frank Milner, who made his first purchase 50 years ago when he spotted a print of a sumo wrestler in a junk shop in Liverpool’s Penny Lane while en route to the offy. He now owns around 300, 50 of which are on loan to this exhibition. They include only one Hokusai landscape, ‘Tama River in Murashi’ (1830-32) from the artist’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji series. The iconic status of Hokusai’s ‘Wave’ has given the false impression that Japanese printmaking was all about landscape, when its principal focus was on contemporary urban life – the sort Baudelaire thought the proper terrain of the modern artist.