|
Japan Prints
Outstanding among the contemporary arts for vitality
and
originality are the works of the creative printmakers,
which have
brought worldwide recognition. The twentieth-century
Japanese print
evolved from the Western idea of a single artist's
conceiving,
executing, and producing one individual work. In contrast,
the
classic ukiyo-e (floating world art) print approach
was of
a team production by an artist designer, craftsman carver,
colorist, printer, and publisher, who promoted sales of
multiple
copies. The modern print movement so stressed the creative
process
that even in the 1980s, editions of prints were seldom
very large
and were apt to differ in color or even design elements
from one
printing to the next.
In the late twentieth century, a broad spectrum of
artistic
styles from traditional to experimental was practiced in a
multiplicity of media and techniques. Munakata Shiko, a
major force
in gaining recognition for creative printmaking, drew
deeply on
Japanese artistic sources, from folk art to Zen
poetry-paintings,
combining kanji with free-floating Chagall-like
figures. He
influenced many other celebrated print artists who drew on
folk art
and used natural earth and mineral colors to depict
traditional
village scenes and lively local festivals. Artists such as
Sekino
Jun'ichiro and Saito Kiyoshi were inspired to update
famous views,
as of the Tokaido, while others played with traditional
themes
derived from sumo, the theater, or geisha. At the opposite
pole are
the works of the abstractionists, the exponents of all the
"isms"
of the day, and the experimental essays of some consummate
designers. Most avant-garde artists worked in mixed media,
often
using engraving techniques with silk-screened colors or
monochromatic metal prints with soldered wires. They
experimented
freely with photomontage, photo-prints made with an
electric
scanner, and lithographs. Photography as an art form came
into its
own in the 1980s, and major international exhibitions
displayed the
stunning products of artist photographers such as Namikawa
Banri,
Kurigama Kazumi, and Hashi. In the 1980s, a trend among
many young
printmakers was toward the use of black and white for
somber, often
superrealistic, themes, captured with exquisite technical
and
artistic precision.
Data as of January 1994
|
