The Art of Rakusan Tsuchiya

Japanese woodblock printing reached a pinnacle during the country’s Edo period from 1603 to 1867 with the genre we know as ukiyo-e, or ‘pictures of the floating world.’ After western influence entered the country in 1867 woodblock printing went into decline. In the early twentieth century artists were more interested in the concept of sosaku-hanga, or 'creative prints, which allowed for more personal expression, more freedom in subject matter.’ In spite of these creative differences and the use of a new term to categorize the art, woodblock printing was still a visible genre in the country’s art. During the first quarter of the twentieth century Rakusan Tsuchiya enjoyed a vigorous period of popularity as a woodblock artist.

Painter, woodblock print artist and printer, Rakusan was born Tsuchiya Kôzô in Hyogo Prefecture in 1896, his family moving to Kyoto while he was still a child. He showed a talent for painting as a boy, and with no introduction from influential supporters, his family still managed to get him accepted as a student of Kyoto’s most famous painter of the day, Seiho Takeuchi. After seven years with the master, Rakusan opened his own studio. During the 1920s and 30s he printed and sold his work from his studio until it was disrupted by World War II. In the 1950s his work was sold in the US by Walter Foster. Rakusan’s best known work is a series of 100 woodblock prints done between 1925 and 1929. The work is called Rakusan Flower and Bird Print Series and became so popular the artist went on to print second and third editions. He died in 1976.

This rough sketch from a Rakusan sketchbook was done between 1929-31 and later reworked into a color print. The flower in the sketch is recognizable as a Japanese iris which would be purple in the final print. The artist eventually destroyed his sketchbooks and without any available notes the bird is difficult to name.

Considered by the artist to be one of his best prints, and titled Tawny Daylily and White-winged Widowbird (Early Summer), this woodblock print was produced in 1930 from an original painting on silk. The day lily was originally a Chinese import, but it has been naturalized for centuries in Japan. The white-winged widowbird is an exotic African species often kept in aviaries.

Titled Dead Tree with Scarlet Kazura Vine and Laughing Thrush (Winter), this woodblock print was also the result of an original painting on silk dating from the late 1920s. The laughing thrush is not native to Japan and would have been an exotic caged specimen. Visible here are three small uncolored areas right of center, bounded by the vine growing above the branch—evidence that the woodblock was improperly carved.

Winter Birds Upon a Plum Tree (1930)

Cuckoo and Bracken (Early Summer) 1930

A few of the seals used by Rakusan

A photograph of Rakusan in his Kyoto studio, seated in the foreground

Autumn Grasshopper

Japanese woodblock printing in its early days required three people: an artist to draw the design, a woodcarver to cut the blocks, and a printer to color the blocks and make the finished prints. Over the years techniques and styles evolved and by the beginning of the twentieth century artists had begun to view the genre as stale and lacking vitality. A group of print artists debated the problem and decided the artist must do the work of designing, carving and printing, carrying the design through singly from concept to completion. A new term was devised to describe this kind of art—sôsaku hanga or creative print.

The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation is a 1968 reprint of an earlier limited edition book published in 1962. James Michener wrote the book’s accompanying text which explains how ten prints were selected by a panel of judges from the work of 275 artists. Each of the ten artists selected received payment for their work and were required to submit 510 copies of the chosen piece, keeping ten copies for their own files and finally destroying the original woodblocks. A copy of the original 475 folio limited editions of The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation released in 1962 would today be a valuable addition to any collector’s library.

An example from the 1968 first popular edition of the book was featured in Scriblets last July. That post featured the work of Maki Haku in a print titled Ushi (Ox). The prints of three other artists included in the book appear below.

Maekawa Sempan (1888-1960)

Son of a shopkeeper in Kyoto, Maekawa Sempan went to Tokyo as a young man to study art. His first job was drawing cartoons and illustrations for a satirical magazine named Pakku (Puck). Maekawa exhibited his first print in the sôsaku hanga style at the age of 31. He said of his own problems, “It took ten years to learn technique. Later, when I got acquainted with other artisans I found out they could have taught me the same things in a few hours.”

At the close of World War II things got better for sôsaku hanga artists and Maekawa was able to make a living on his prints. A favorite subject was scenes from Japanese hot springs and he published several series titled Hot Spring Notes. His popularity increased with colorful designs of ordinary people at festivals, as well as scenes depicting local customs and observations from life in the countryside. With the exception of a few linocuts, Maekawa worked exclusively with woodcuts, never displaying interest in Western techniques. His style, especially after the war was decorative, cheerful and colorful.

Rampu (Lamp) by Maekawa Sempan, 1960-61

The artist’s comment: “Autumn is my favorite season, particularly early autumn when the first cool days come around. In this print I fetched from my childhood memories of autumn days one of the lamps that we used to use and then perched an autumn insect on it.”

Mori Yoshitoshi (1896-1992)

For most of his life Mori Yoshitoshi worked as a textile designer and only began creating art prints at the age of 57. Born in Tokyo and trained at the Kawabata School of Fine Arts, after graduation he became a textile designer and dyer of kimono fabrics. Mori preferred earth colors as well as idealistic subjects taken from folk art, kabuki theater or characters in Japanese mythology, designs often humorous and expressing dynamic movement.

The artist enjoyed incredible energy in his later years. From the late 50s until the end of his life he exhibited regularly in Japan as well as abroad. Prints by Mori hang in major museums worldwide, including the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Barcelona Museum of Arts and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His works are today rather rare and high priced.

Kagura no doke (Kagura Buffoonery) by Mori Yoshitoshi, 1960

The artist’s comment: “This work was inspired by the comic kagura dances given at Shinto shrine festivals throughout Japan. The dancers come onto the stage, generally a roofed outdoor platform in the shrine precincts, and to the accompaniment of the traditional drum and flute give hilarious pantomimes, which are also known as fools’ dances. The idea for this print came from my fond childhood memories of such fools’ dances.”

Kinoshita Tomio (1923- )

Inspired by the work of Un’ichi Hiratsuka and self-taught, Kinoshita began making prints at the age of 32. He startled the Tokyo art world in 1957 with a series of large prints done in a striking new style. The prints were of stylized human heads in only black and one other color. Both critics and buyers were impressed and a new artist was launched. Kinoshita cut many of his blocks entirely with a single cutting tool, either a flat chisel or a U-shaped gouge. He used the gouge to cut jagged parallel lines to define shapes such as the faces and bodies of partly abstracted human figures and to resemble the grain of wood.

The chief characteristic in the print shown here is the jagged lines which the artist used to convey the sense of woodgrain, an artistic invention that turns out to be better than realism. It was carved on two Judas tree boards and printed on natural color torinoko paper, a permanent type made from natural fiber; printed with carmine and vermilion watercolors to achieve the orange, and sumi ink for the black. Kinoshita made three impressions of the orange, and two for the black.

Kao 3 (Faces No. 3) by Kinoshita Tomio, 1959-61

The artist’s comment: “A full title for this print would be ‘Faces of the Weak Courageously Attempting to Move Forward in a World of Darkness.’ This is one in a series of prints I have been working on for four or five years, all having the common motif of faces or masks. In combinations of faces such as the present I am trying to express the sufferings of society, of man, of mankind, of all living beings. I am not too certain of my results: perhaps in the end I have produced mere ‘prints.’”

Ink, Space and the Woodblock Print

One item on the while-in-town to-do list was getting new tires for the car, and after a little comparative shopping I left the car at the shop with the best options and walked across the street—in fact, waited ten minutes to get safely across an eight lane highway—to a bookstore that has sprung up in Maitland in the last few months. It’s called Bright Light Books, is a used bookstore buying as well as selling books, comics, Japanese manga, CDs and DVDs. Clean, quiet, friendly, big and incredibly stocked with great buys. One wall is devoted to collectable books, which includes a healthy heap of signed and unsigned first editions. Dangerous kind of place for one with weak control in bookstores. I told the man at the register that all the books in my stack were costing more than new tires, in spite of the bargain prices.

In a remote corner on a low hard to reach shelf one particular book sat waiting for discovery by the right someone, and this time it was me. The book is a 1968 reprint of an earlier limited edition, The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation, of which only 475 copies were published in 1962. In imperial folio size on the finest of handmade Japanese vellum, the binding was done in three colors of pure, fine-weave hemp cloth. From 275 artists ten prints were selected by a panel of judges. Each of the ten artists received $2,378, and each artist submitted 510 copies of his chosen work, was allowed to keep ten copies for his files and finally required to destroy the original woodblocks. It’s hard to imagine what one of those original 475 folio editions is worth today. The smaller and later edition I found was barely over $10.00.

A little about the process of woodblock printing…

In the early days of the art, sometime in the early 1700s, the artist drew the design, a woodcarver cut the blocks, and a printer colored the blocks and made the finished prints. These stages were always done by three different men. As art invariably does over time, techniques and styles evolve and in the case of woodblock printing, a group of young Japanese artists in the beginning of the twentieth century decided that if the genre were to recapture its vitality, in contrast to the earlier methods modern print artists must do the designing, carving and printing, following a design through from concept to completion. The new term to describe this kind of art was sôsaku hanga—creative print.

All ten of the sôsaku hanga in The Modern Japanese Print are nothing less than stunning, but it is the last of the ten that so strongly impresses me. “Ushi” or ‘Ox’ is by Maki Haku (1924-2000) an artist without any formal training, whose primary job was as an elementary school vice-principal. But he did have the good fortune to make prints for two years under the guidance of Onchi Kôshirô, a leading artist of his day. As in the piece below, Maki is best known for his abstract calligraphic designs. The example below was done with four blocks of three wood types: cherry, Philippine mahogany, and castor wood. One block was printed in gaufrage (relief) to define the outer edges of the print with an embossed line; the others printed in sumi (India) ink and black Japanese-style pigment, on natural-color kozo paper. One impression was made for the gaufrage block and two for the black blocks.

Maki commented on his work this way: “This print is based upon the character ushi, meaning ‘cow’ or ‘ox.’ I have tried to give the ideograph a modern feel, but in an Oriental style. This meant trying to capture the typically Japanese expression of the beauty of space, the sense of reverence for boundless space, while at the same time taking advantage of the boundaries within the life and beauty of the paper itself. The beauty of sumi in its monochrome black penetrates the paper and forbids decorative exaggeration or irrelevancies. This effect combines with a succinct, straightforward approach to create space and expression that, though intentionally compact, still has a quiet and gentle spread. The two small red seals are an integral part of the composition, providing color and a focal point, thus making the impersonality of the ink’s space deeper and wider and warmer.”