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.

The concept of ‘the floating world’ that originated in Buddhist philosophy as a warning of the transience of earthly life evolved in the hands of the popular printmakers of Edo – the world’s largest city, with a population by the mid-19th century of one million – into a celebration of urban pleasures. Most woodblock prints of the late Edo period feature male acting stars and female fashion icons. The captivating exhibition gives a vivid glimpse into Edo-style celebrity culture – Kabuki heartthrobs, prize-winning sumo wrestlers, courtesan influencers – which is not so different from ours.

Along with fashion, Japanese printmakers kept pace with the modernisation that gathered steam under the Meiji government after 1868. The invention of the rickshaw in 1869 gave city-dwelling women new independence, at the risk of the sort of molestation depicted in Toyohara Kunichika’s ‘Kabuki Rickshaw Scene: Young Woman Upset’ (1871). The 1870s saw the arrival of rail travel: a print from 1872 by Utagawa Kunitero records the first steam locomotive to run from Tokyo to Yokohama, built in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire and now residing in Japan’s National Railway Museum – a reminder, in the country of the bullet train, of the glory days of British engineering. Photography was another area in which Japanese technology quickly overtook the West. When Kunichika pictured ‘The Geisha Kogiku Looking at Photographs’ (1870, see below), cartes de visite taken with western cameras were status symbols costing seven times the price of a woodblock print, which could be had for the price of two bowls of noodles. Woodblock was a truly democratic art form.

The images of women on their own feel astonishingly contemporary: Kunichika’s ‘Geisha Some of Yanagibashi Holding a Cat’ (1870); Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s tousle-haired teahouse musician with a ‘Desire to Have a Shimada Hairstyle’ (1852); above all Kunichika’s ‘3am Mother with Crying Baby’ (1890), an image that defies space and time. Yet by then, in Japan, Ukiyo-e prints were going out of fashion. By the turn of the century a new generation of artists was looking outside Japan for inspiration. Go West, young man, was the order of the day, and in 1899 the 23-year-old painter Yoshida Hiroshi did. In October of that year, with fellow artist Hachino Nakagawa, he set off on a tour of America and Europe, stopping in London to visit the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and South Kensington Museum. Also on his itinerary was Dulwich Picture Gallery, but when he asked for directions at Victoria Station, he was told by the policeman on duty that it didn’t exist. A second attempt proved equally fruitless, but as his 29 May 1900 signature in the gallery’s visitor book attests, Hiroshi was not one to take no for an answer – on his third attempt, he made it. Now, more than a century later, his perseverance has been rewarded by the gallery with an exhibition of woodblock prints by three generations of his family.

Hiroshi was 44 when he took up printmaking as a way of capitalising on his watercolour landscapes which, with their fusion of Japanese and European styles, had proved popular in America. An insatiable sightseer, he trotted the globe with his wife Fujio ticking off famous tourist sites, from ‘El Capitan’ (1925) to the ‘Sphinx ‘(1925) to ‘The Taj Mahal’ (1932), turning his on-the-spot sketches into charming, meticulously executed prints. A dab hand with the dimmer switch, he specialised in casting the same view in different lights: it didn’t bother him that, printed from the same plate, an identical group of travellers on camels were seen passing the Sphinx by day and by night, when they might have been tucked up in bed.

As alluring as Hiroshi’s images are, they look to modern eyes like Victorian illustrations: if Arthur Rackham had been set down in a ‘Bamboo Wood’ he would have come up with something very similar to Hiroshi’s 1939 print, but quirkier. Hiroshi’s Japanese landscapes are tourist clichés, all wisteria and cherry blossom. His wife Fujio was more adventurous: her intimate close-ups of flowers, magnified by being placed in fishbowls, are oddly reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s, although she was unaware of the American artist’s work at the time.

The couple’s sons Toshi and Hodaka followed different paths. In his ‘Tokyo at Night’ series Toshi feels closer to the Ukiyo-e tradition than his father, while aware of modernism: the reflections of lit riverside windows ‘From the Ryogoku Bridge’ (1939) form a rippling grid on the dusky water. Afflicted with the family travel bug, in the early 1970s he embarked with his family on a classic American road trip in an Airstream trailer, but the tourists he depicted queuing for admission to the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe hang about in much the same way as the fans outside Utagawa Hiroshige III’s ‘Entrance to a Sumo Tournament’ (c1874) a century earlier.

In the 1960s Toshi flirted with abstraction in prints with titles such as ‘Abstruse’ (1964), but Hodaka – the family rebel – went further. He tactfully refrained from showing his abstract prints until after his traditionalist father’s death in 1950, yet the calligraphic dynamism of images like ‘Kite’ (1959) feels truer to the Ukiyo-e tradition in spirit.

In the late 1960s he responded to western pop art in screenprints like ‘Nonsense Mythology’ (1969), but his most original creations were the dreamlike ‘Mythologies of the Outskirts of Town’ (1977), combining photo engraving and woodcut to project images of birds and female figures on to the backdrops of houses photographed on his global travels.

The real innovators in the Yoshida clan seem to have been the women. Hodaka’s wife Chizuko, after experimenting with geometric and biomorphic abstraction in the 1950s, then gestural abstraction in the 1960s, developed an exquisite combination of embossed ‘blind printing’ and woodblock culminating in the lace-like intricacy of ‘Reef C’ (1976), a bird’s eye view of the Great Barrier Reef teeming with miniature marine life forms. The show ends with an installation by Yoshida Ayomi, daughter of Chizuko and Hodaka and granddaughter of Hiroshi, papering the walls of the final room with cherry blossom. For a medium once devoted to recording ephemera, Japanese woodblock printing has proved very durable.