Americans have long been familiar with Japanese prints, but that familiarity has not extended much beyond recognized Old Masters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Utamaro and Hiroshige. The enforced opening of Japan to the West in 1859 inspired a flood of prints documenting the arrival of the first foreigners and the astonishingly rapid modernization of Japan. Brash, vulgar, popular, even garish in their use of chemical dyes, these works have long been neglected both in Japan and the West. Yet they express a reckless vitality, an excitement that echoes the exuberant spirit of a new, youthful Japan about to step onto the world stage for the first time as a major international power.
Educational as well as entertaining, prints also played a role in the incredible transformation of Japan into an industrial society in the course of just one generation. Inexpensive and mass-produced, they were widely distributed not only in Tokyo, the thriving capital city with a population of one million, but were carried by itinerant vendors throughout the country into the most remote provinces. Designed to familiarize, endorse, explain, and praise the process of modernization, these new woodcuts offered eye-catching, graphic guidance to the citizens of a highly self-conscious society.
Yokohama Prints
In the 1860s the so-called Yokohama prints introduced Western merchants in Yokohama to the Japanese populace, and in the 1870s, with the beginning of the Meiji era (1868-1912), they went on to encourage Japanese pride in domestic progress, touting the latest in Western imports and new technology. In the 1880s even members of the royal family were depicted as models of westernization. Later, during the Sino-Japanese war of 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, woodcuts served as propaganda, fanning the flames of martial patriotism and helping to inspire much-needed national unity.
In the late nineteenth century, at a time when French artists such as Henri Riviere and Auguste Lepere and a few Americans such as Arthur Wesley Dow were just beginning to experiment with the color woodblock medium--having been inspired by Japanese imports--the Japanese artists, with a heritage of nearly two centuries of multicolor printing, could depend upon a highly specialized division of skilled labor that guaranteed a final product of masterful technical facility. Painter, carver, printer, and publisher worked together to create artistic effects that belied the ephemeral nature of the color woodcut.
A copyist traced the artist's original design onto a thin sheet of strong translucent paper. The engraver then pasted the copied drawing face down on a hard block of wood and cut away parts of the block, leaving the lines to be printed in relief. Once carved, this became the key block from which the line image was printed with black ink. The color blocks were carved separately. Kneeling or sitting in front of the block, the printer brushed a combination of a little rice paste and pigment mixed with water onto the raised surface of the color blocks. (Imported aniline dyes produced the vivid colors that were favored in the 1880s.) The printer placed the key-block-printed sheet face down on a color block and rubbed the moistened, sized paper with a hard circular pad until the color was transferred. The process was repeated with each color block until all the colors were printed. It was the publisher who financed, advertised, and
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