JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINTS: THREE HUNDRED YEARS
10th September - 9th October 2021
Three Thousand Years
Ito Shinsui
Alongside Jill Campbell’s exhibition, ‘Fell Walks’, Gallagher & Turner will be showing ‘Three Hundred Years’, a selection of Japanese woodblock prints.
The golden age of Japanese woodblock printing in the 18th and 19th centuries saw the spread of a highly popular and affordable art form, described as ukiyo-e, or 'pictures of the floating world'. The floating world is an expression meaning the fleeting, ephemeral pleasures of life: the theatre, beautiful women, or courtesans, folklore stories and the beauty of animals, flowers and plants. Produced in books, scrolls, or as loose sheets, woodblock prints were made and circulated widely throughout Japanese society from the early 1600s right through until the mid 20th century, with some artists still operating with new styles and methods today.
The Village School, Sugawara Denju Tenerai Kagami
Yoshiiku
Ukiyo-e prints were collaboratively produced by the ukiyo-e quartet, composed of the publisher, the artist, the engraver and the printer. Early illustrated woodblock books were printed on fine, expensive papers, and frequently reimagined Japanese classics which had previously only been hand painted on scrolls for society’s highest elites. Due to their popularity, printers were quick to develop processes to create more affordable books for the mass market, and on a wider range of subjects, including satirical novels, art books, travel guides and advice manuals. These also led to images that had humorous or erotic elements, as well as greetings cards that depicted animals, townscapes or popular temples.
The technique of producing images using delicately hand-carved blocks flourished during the Edo and Meiji periods in the 18th and 19th centuries, with skilled artists such as Utamaro (1750 - 1806), Kunisada (1786 - 1865) and Yoshitoshi (1868 - 1912) creating more intricate designs using vivid colours and glazes. Prints were produced as illustrations for historical subjects, including tales of famous samurai warriors or high-ranking societal figures. They were also created to accompany to kabuki plays, depicting actors in extravagant makeup and poses, often playing renowned samurais. Many of the most popular images were reprinted by new printmakers decades later (although still well over a century ago now), carefully reproducing the prints by hand as a celebration of the original artist’s work.
Temple in Winter
Shin-hanga
In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the reopening of the European trade with Japan in 1858, Japanese art, including woodblock prints gained such popularity in the West that the term 'Japonisme' was coined by the French critic Philippe Burty. Works by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige came to be cherished by European and American audiences.
References to woodblock prints are abundant in European art of the same periods – renowned British artists such as James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Rennie Mackintosh took inspiration from Japanese use of depth, colours and forms. In Japan, however, traditional woodblock prints gradually fell out of fashion as the country was modernising. In the early twentieth century, two group of artists emerged – the sōsaku hanga movement advocated for artists to complete prints independently and promoted realism as their preferred style, whereas shin hanga embraced the traditional collaborative process and motifs. When the former group was striving for an expressive image that reinterpreted Japan's cultural identity, the latter offered a nostalgic interpretation of pre-industrial Japanese, mostly for Euro-American collectors.
Today Japanese woodblock prints are some of the most instantly recognisable and celebrated works in the history of Japanese art, and are collected around the world. They represent some of the most remarkable examples of fine printmaking and craftsmanship in the art world, with extraordinarily detailed designs that remain as brilliantly coloured as they were two hundred years or more ago.
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