Japanese Prints

Section
1:
THE EARLY PRINTS

THE AESTHETIC heart of any ukiyo-e collection must be found among prints like those presented in this section, for here the basic spirit of ukiyo-e asserts itself, and without an appreciation of these early prints one can never savor the essence of this enchanting art form. Fortunately, a fair number of these are in circulation today, and some of the finest are not prohibitively expensive, being within the reach of any collector.

Technically, ukiyo-e developed from book illustrations printed by means of carved wood blocks, and it was from such a page that Print 257 was taken. As the artists' skill grew, it was easy to drop the text from the book and offer albums composed solely of black-and-white prints. These were the sumizuri-e which were discussed earlier, and four of the most pleasing are shown as Prints 17-20. Some of the finest ukiyo-e appeared originally in such albums, and many sheets are still available at reasonable prices. Print 18 was among the first ukiyo-e I purchased, and it remains one of my favorites, a storybook thing whose joyous, saucy line catches the spirit of this art. If I were interested in the essence of ukiyo-e and could afford only one print, I would not select either a Harunobu or a Sharaku, for I might study such a color print without ever discovering what it was that made ukiyo-e great; unquestionably I would choose a sumizuri-e, say Moronobu's masterwork, Print 11, for then I would see constantly before me the essence of the art: its singing line.

From album sheets bound together to summarize a popular story or erotic incident it was an easy jump to single sheets which stood forth as their own justification, and it is these towering sheets that are the glory of ukiyo-e. Print 15 is a classic example and one of the high points of this collection. The two Kiyomasus, Prints 21 and 23, show what vigor could be obtained. Such sheets are excessively rare; fortunately, they are not essential to a basic understanding of ukiyo-e, for one can also learn the lessons they teach through the lesser album sheets. But as artistic units, the swirling Kaigetsudo women, standing aloof and solemn against their white and formless background, are wonderfully pleasing. Furthermore, they epitomize the early period, during which the ukiyo-e artists did their strongest work.

The next step in the development of ukiyo-e was inevitable. Print 16 shows what gratifying results were achieved when one of the massive sumizuri-e was turned over to a worker who daubed it with primitive colors; legend says that the original artist rarely bothered with this brushwork, leaving it to someone else, preferably elderly women. The red lead, called tan, was especially effective, and prints which featured it were popularly called tan-e. Prints 16, 22, and 25 feature tan.

The next development was a multiple one, consisting of three distinct parts, and which came first is difficult to say, but Print 28 is an example of what occurred. First, the color palette was broadened; tan was dropped and the artist was free to choose from more than a dozen different colors. In this case Kiyomasu used red, pink, yellow, khaki, and smoky gray. Second, gold dust was sprinkled over selected areas, here the foremost boat, in order to heighten visual appeal, Third, urushi, a lacquer-like substance often made of black ink and cheap glue, was daubed over areas that were required to stand out, in this case the woman's coat, lending them a scintillating brilliance. Adding these three innovations together, one gets the famous urushi-e, "lacquer print." Sometimes, as in Print 24, the urushi was not mixed with black but appeared as a thin, glistening, translucent fixative. The collector who loves urushi-e is fortunate, for many of these prints are in circulation at modest prices. I find them delightful, small in size, sometimes gaudy in execution, but always evocative of the beginning days of the art. In many ways they resemble primitive Italian paintings depicting the lives of lesser saints: they are awkward, flamboyant, and tenderly reverent. Urushi-e depict not saints but actors, as in the case of Prints 24, 26, and 27, and I commend these affectionate little prints most warmly, for one can often derive from them a personal pleasure that larger, more polished prints do not generate. As we saw in the case of tan-e, the three components-the colors, the gold dust, and the urushi-were applied by hand and pretty surely not by the artist himself.

10. TOYONOBU: Girl after Bath. Page 262

The next development was a crucial one, and from it grew the later perfections of ukiyo-e. Print 73 was not colored by hand. It was printed exclusively from blocks, the black outline having been obtained from the key block, the rose-red from a second and completely separate block, and the apple-green from a third. This innovation of printing colors from blocks rather than applying them by hand produced startling results. At first, however, its use was restricted to two colors only, rose-red and apple-green, and since the former is known as beni, the two-color prints are called benizuri-e, "red-printed pictures."

Why these particular colors were chosen no one knows, nor are we sure what artist first used them, although there is a suspicion that Masanobu in some work like Print 51 may have done so. It is an extraordinary fact, possibly unmatched in art history, that for more than a decade a group of vivid, experimental, and strong-minded artists were willing to confine their palette largely to these two apparently haphazardly selected colors. On the other hand, some of the choicest ukiyo-e resulted from this discipline, for when one's eye becomes accustomed to rose-red and apple-green one derives from their skillful juxtaposition an entire range of color values. In this book Prints 73 and 81, among others, illustrate what was accomplished in this form, but since the beni used fades rapidly when exposed to light, their original impact is today somewhat diminished.

I should now like to make one simple recommendation to anyone wishing to start an ukiyo-e collection: acquire an album sheet, an urushi-e, and a benizuri-e. This can be done at no great expense, although it may take several years to find appropriate bargains. With good examples of these three beginning types, the collector can add what he will, or avoid what he does not like, yet always be sure of having a selection founded upon the artistic principles that made ukiyo-e originally popular in the streets of Edo and later treasured in the art galleries of the world.

More tardily than one might have expected, ukiyo-e artists mastered the technique of keeping three different colors in register, as demonstrated in the print on this page where blue joins red and green. In Print 85 gray was the third color, and in others yellow was added with great effectiveness. Obviously, at this point the ukiyo-e artists were aesthetically ready to make prints utilizing the full color spectrum; but they had to wait a while for the perfection of some device that would insure perfect registry of their blocks through eight or ten different printings, for this simple trick of printing with many colors was not yet forthcoming.

For the time being the artists experimented with a technique that proved to be somewhat less than successful. In Print 98 the artist has used three basic colors; red, green, and blue. But for the actor's outer robe he has also experimented with this new technical development: he has printed blue over red in an attempt to produce purple. But the result is rather muddy, for the two components have remained separated and have not blended. Similarly, in Print 85 red has been overprinted by gray in a most unsatisfactory attempt to achieve purple. The collection contains several dozen prints showing the basic failure of this particular experiment. Blue and yellow should yield green, but only when mixed; when one is merely superimposed upon the other the colors remain blue and yellow and the result is muddy. But these prints do prove that the buying public was hungry for more color and that the artists were eager to produce it; in this technical impasse the era of the early prints ended.

These prints are also interesting for other technical reasons. Print 43 has been reproduced as large as possible to show how the early ukiyo-e artists were fond of experimenting with European perspective, which they studied in pictures introduced by the Dutch at Nagasaki. Such perspective prints are called uki-e, loosely "bird's-eye pictures," and it is noteworthy that Japanese artists rejected what we think of as accurate perspective because they preferred the tilting Asiatic convention, as shown in Prints 9 and 52, which produced pictures that were much more pleasing to them.

Print 50 shows how Japanese artists used wood blocks to achieve the same effect the Chinese had obtained from stone rubbings, and the Japanese name for such prints, ishizuri-e, "stone-printed pictures," indicates this derivation. Print 36, of which more later, shows how pleasing such prints can be.

When the smaller prints known as hoso-e, "narrow pictures," became popular, publishers found it convenient and no doubt profitable to carve onto one large block three related pictures, with each one separately tided and signed. To rich patrons they sold the entire unsevered triptych, as shown in Prints 86-91. A few such complete triptychs have come down to us, and they are rare and treasured. More often, the canny publisher cut his big sheets into three separate items for quicker sale to his poorer customers; but in later years collectors were occasionally able to reassemble these cut triptychs. Thus the three perfectly matched single sheets, Prints 93-95, must have come from the same original big sheet; but more often collectors have stumbled upon three different prints from three different original sources, as seems to have been the case with Prints 68-70.

At the same time, publishers occasionally provided their artists with choice large pieces of wood upon which single designs rather than triptychs were cut, and these again are treasured items. Prints 81 and 92 were carved upon such oversized blocks, the latter being instructive in that it shows how poorly the artists usually designed such large areas, being more at home in smaller compositions.

On the other hand, these artists exhibited the most extraordinary skill in designing tall, narrow prints. They varied from fairly wide prints like 33, through standard sizes like Prints 76 and 83, and on to the culmination of this branch of the art, the extremely narrow print shown on the facing page. The wider prints were known as kakemono-e, "hanging-thing pictures," and the narrowest as hashira-e, "pillar pictures."

In leaving these early prints one must not forget that when ukiyo-e reached Europe to dazzle and instruct the impressionists and to startle the general art world, it was not these early prints that did the work; the international fame of ukiyo-e has always rested on the later color prints. Nevertheless, many collectors find their greatest joy in these earlier prints, a choice that is neither affectation nor antiquarianism. These early prints are bold, vigorous in design, excellently drawn. They are authentic Japanese art from one of the great periods of Japanese history and as such are treasured.