ART: Hiroshige Prints

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Monet’s dining room at Giverny photo credit: http://giverny-impression.com/category/monets-house/

Got it. I’ve learned how influential Japanese prints were to Impressionism. I love the story that says they were discovered used as packing for “Oriental” objects shipped from Japan favored by been “pop culture” in Paris.  For Degas, it was about the perspective use and the formatting, never mind that he used a camera with facility, and that the camera was, and is, the transformative power behind modern art.  When I visited Giverny, I found that in Monet’s house over 230 Japanese prints hang.  Why did he and the other Impressionists  love them so much?

Why do I, too, respond with such alacrity to them?  They are powerfully colorful, graphic, lyric, filled with narrative, flattened and modern, like grown-up coloring books. Composition is superb, and certain stylistic features are beguiling. There’s a rich narrative in each one, too.  And I love the landscape genre, and the veneration of land itself that’s integral to “ukioy-e”, the Japanese woodblock tradition of the Edo Period.  Then I saw that I could understand the connection to Impressionism, another long-favored style, more fully.

Claude Monet, Haystacks at Chailly, Sunrise, 1865 San Diego Museum of Art

Image credit cantseetheforest.com

French and Japanese Landscape Identity

The French  love their land deeply; the haystacks of Monet are nurturing breasts of French identity. For the Japanese, the animism of ancient Shinto belief connected them to the spirits present in the features of their islands.

Hiroshige, Futamigara in Ise Province, 1858

photo credit: Wikipedia Commons  

This view of Futami Bay shows the “Wedded Rocks”, a sacred Shinto shrine. They symbolize the “Adam and Eve” of Japan, and the union of the Japanese people with the tangible “land of the Rising Sun”.

Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Champs-Elysee during the Paris Fair, 1867

photo credit: www.renoir gallery.com 

The Floating World and  the Belle Epoque: Seminal Cultural Events

For the Impressionists, who searched to capture the transitory moments and images of light and shadow, the “Floating World” of “ukioy-e” depicted the fleeting pleasures of leisure in Edo’s red-light districts, gardens, restaurants, theatres, and by-ways. It captured the daily activities of a culture and city yet to become modern, and with a growing affluence rooted in deep connection to nature and country.  This describes the French in Paris at about the same period, as they took their leisure in the delights of the city and its environs.

Hiroshige, Temple Gardens at Nippori, 1857

photo credit:

Brooklyn Museum The Floating World and European Vanitas

The term “floating world” seems well-struck to us; the world of play and enjoyment lightens burdens, and yet it was an allusion to the Buddhist term “sorrowful world”, the earth and our material bodily existence on it.  For the West, still life and flowers summon “vanitas”, the knowledge of waiting death.  Both attitudes accept a heavenly destiny at the end of time served.

Hiroshige: Sea of Satta in Suruga Province, 1858

photo permission: Norton Simon Museum of Art  

Pictorial Space: Perspective, Cropping, and Formatting

This one is already well recognized and accepted, but still worth revisiting.  What were some of the “tricks” of composition that were used by Hiroshige and other printmakers?

Hiroshige, The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival, 1857        Claude Monet, Rue Montargueil with Flags, 1886

The compositions are inventive, balancing broad horizontal areas with vertical crossed elements and then energized with diagonals, reversing curves, and graphic, decorative textural details.  Hiroshige frequently used a high, angled point-of-view, looking downward onto unusual landscape features, a very large foreground object or feature framing the scene dramatically.

The last series he designed was “One Hundred Famous View of Edo”, published in 1856. Though the subject was landscape, he used the “portrait” (oban) format, which was more novel.   More brightly colored, in this series his bold framing devices are solutions for most of the 118 compositions.

Hiroshige,Tajima Province, Iai Valley, Kannon Cave, 1856, from Hiroshige’s Journey in the 60-odd Provinces

Landscape features are often flattened, simplified, and integrated one into another with a curving shape or line. Horizontal hatching shades and grounds figure groups and adds texture. Tree shapes and simplified and decorative.  Use of repetitive lines for waving grasses, tree limbs, and leaves adds textural emphasis.  Tonal gradation creates recession and distance to an invisible horizon line.

It’s easy to see how the Impressionists melded the compositional lessons of the printmakers into their own work.

Kazuo Oga, animator-artist for Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro 

Landscape features themselves have a pictorial logic of their own: almost caricatured, distorted, exaggerated trees, water, waves, rocks and mountains thrust powerfully up and through the compositions.  In this stylistic form, we see the seminal forms of anime and manga to come.

I have loved “Evening Snow at Kanbara”  all my life, and finding “Sunken Road” to pair with it seems very appropriate.  A scene of quiet dailyness, lonely calm, still, and luminous, the composition taking us deep into a quiet world. 

 Hiroshige made many bird-flower prints, the bird-flower pairing carefully composed with a poem. The birds’ poses are animated, while the flower rests open, each captured in a second of passing time.  another form of printing were “pasted” images, intended for cutting or collage - what were they affixed to, I wonder?  A most wonderful new series for me was”Scenes from Legend and History”, a detailed, refined group with decorative borders printed. This print is from “Old Edo Tales”.

Hiroshige appropriated freely. This practice was common and seemed not to raise issues of originality, copying, or copyright, nor did it seem to devalue or deluster the appropriating artist.  Probably this was due to the apprentice system practiced in Japan, in which budding artists worked in other established artists’ studios, copying their work, and taking their master’s name when deemed “ready”.The image/literary base was ancient, magnificent, and freely available to artist/artisans in Japan, and the printmakers borrowed most freely from each other and the past.  Hiroshige used old travel/guide books, gazetteers, and older prints as sources.  Sometimes he extrapolated from the illustrations in them, changing the point of view, simplifying, re-arranging and excluding features. Some features were copied almost exactly.  It is thought that Hiroshige actually visited very few of the spots he portrayed.  And how plein-air is vital for some painters!  

 

Above we see how Hiroshige copied the earlier master, Hokusai, who probably used earlier sources based on yet older images.  The contrast between the West’s prizing of the originating seminal master and Japanese artist synthetic process is startling, forcing a re-thinking of value placed on artistic stature and accomplishment, and of the bitterness accompanying our accusations of imitation,  artistic pirating, and image ownership.  In “Common as Air”, Lewis Hyde’s new book on corporate ownership of culture and scientific property, questions raised in his last book, “The Gift”, about intrinsic value in advanced/post-industrial capitalism are examined.  Should scientific, intellectual, and artistic patrimony by “owned”?  What ultimate value is there in a proprietary structure such as ours?

A Western artist cringes when he is called out by art critics for seminal and derivative connections, or criticized. More dramatically he is sued for copyright infringement, as Shepard Fairey was for his poster of President Obama.  A western artist must take on an “outlaw” situation in order to do this, while other cultures view the process as neutral, acceptable, offering a kind of “genre-continuity” and preservation of cultural legacies, and hold the artists/artisans themselves  as “national treasures”.

The example of a communitarian appropriation process offered us by Japanese printmaking certainly offers a fresh perspective on how we hold our art and artistic heritage, and make ongoing use of our cultural treasures.  Certainly value is added by access to it.  The major issue is the quality and shape of the synthesis devised by the artist.  Perhaps cultural diversity should model the biological in this regard.

The refreshing perspective I arrive at has to do with the conclusions of a revisionist valuing. The intention of the Impressionist painters was to create “the new”. Their stance was a model for artistic reform, though their antecedents aren’t hard to locate.  The establishment, because of their proprietary paradigm, attacked the new, unable to make a consideration of possible value. They were left looking a bit foolish as history and media-availability forced a re-evaluation of the Impressionists’ accomplishment.

In Japan, woodblock prints were enjoyed and valued at many economic levels, but their homogeneous culture would have to wait for a Western perspective to be layered onto their own valuing.

For both cultures, the historical and economic process resulting in an enriched, reflexive valuing of mutual heritages, one of the many stories of globalization and its consequences.