MISTY EVENING AT SHINOBAZU POND: By Shiro Kasamatsu (1932)

Misty Evening at Shinobazu Pond*

Shiro Kasamatsu (January 11, 1898 - June 14, 1991) was a print maker of shin hanga style for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. During the last years Kasamatsu prints have developed to some kind of insiders' tip for collectors of Japanese prints and art lovers.

Shiro Kasamatsu was born in Tokyo in 1898. At the age of 13 he entered the painting school of Kaburagi Kiyokata - a master in traditional Japanese painting and printmaking. Kasamatsu was very talented, and beginning at a young age, his paintings were shown in various exhibitions.

When the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo saw one of Kasamatsu's paintings, he was impressed and in 1919 convinced the young artist to make designs for woodblock prints. This was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

By the late 1940s Kasamatsu had created more than 50 prints commissioned and published by Watanabe. Most unfortunately for us, all the Kasmatsu blocks and unsold prints prior to 1923 were lost In the Great Kanto Earthquake when fires raged for three days through Tokyo and destroyed Watanabe's print shop.

Another famous student of Kaburagi Kiyokata was Kawase Hasui. Also Hasui became a very close cooperation partner for Watanabe's circle of shin hanga artists. Kaburagi Kiyokata was certainly the one who introduced Kawase Hasui, Ito Shinsui, Kasamatsu and others to Watanabe.

In the early 1950s Shiro Kasamatsu changed his publisher partner to Unsodo in Kyoto creating nearly 100 prints for him through 1960. The prints designed for Unsodo are nearly exclusively in Shin Hanga style and show traditional subjects - mostly landscapes and a few interior scenes in soft colors. Like Kawase Hasui, Kasamatsu shows his true mastership in night, rain and in snow scenes.

During this same period, Shiro Kasamatsu started experimenting in Sosaku Hanga style - self-carved, self-printed and self-published. The style of these self-published prints is clearly sosaku hanga style - more modern, more Western-like, less refined, and more original. The subjects are landscapes and  many kacho-e - prints that show birds and flowers.

The development of Kasamatsu's printmaking style shows a similarity to that of one of his  contemporaries - Tomikichiro Tokuriki from Kyoto, who also  created sosaku hanga while he published works in shin hanga style with Uchida and Unsodo from Kyoto.

The explanation for this parallel creation of two different styles of woodblock prints is simple -  the prints in shin hanga style assured a steady income, while the works in sosaku hanga style remained more of a hobby or simply an exercise in art rather  than a business. Tomikichiro Tokuriki once expressed it clearly this way:

"I'd rather do nothing but creative prints, but after all, I sell maybe ten of them against two hundred for a publisher-artisan print."

It can be assumed that the situation was precisely the same for Shiro Kasamatsu. The artist had created about 80 of his self-published 'hobby' prints between 1955 and 1965.

*Shinobazu Pond is located in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

ONE HUNDRED FACES - GOSSIP, STUTTERER: By Kobayashi Kiyochika

One Hundred Faces - Gossip, Stutterer

Kobayashi Kiyochika made the compilation of humorous gestures and faces titled “Shinban Sanju-ni So” (New Thirty-two Faces). Because of the popularity of the series, he made additional designs and combined them into one series, “Tsuika Hyaku Men So” (Addition; One Hundred Faces).

From left top to right bottom: “Mimi Komori” (whisper, gossip). “Domori” (Stutterer). “Tohmi” (Looking far away, Oh so beautiful...). “Karashi ga kiita” (Very effective mustard. Wow, so spicy!).

Kobayashi Kiyochika (小林 清親 September 10, 1847- November 28, 1915) was a Japanese ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Meiji period,born at a time when the old order of the Shogunate was already on shaky grounds and an adolescent when Western civilization rolled over Japan. For him, life became like a small boat in a rough sea

He was born into a family of lower-ranked samurai that served the Tokugawa family — something which a hundred years earlier or even fifty years earlier would have been a very pleasant thing; but in Japan, times were changing.

In 1853 a U.S. Naval fleet of black iron ships — unknown before in Japan — anchored off the Japanese coast near Uraga. One year later in 1854, Japan was forced to open its borders for commercial relations with the United States in the Treaty of Kanagawa. This was the end of the old order. From then on, things changed too rapidly for a country that had sealed off its borders for 250 years.

Soon skirmishes broke out between the Loyalists — supporters of the old (Edo Period) order, mainly the samurai class who saw their century-old privileges going down the drain — and the promoters of the new order. The enemies of the Shogun rallied around the Emperor, who had resided in Kyoto since 1192 as a purely ceremonial figurehead — a toothless tiger.

But now, the tiger began to wake up and to show his teeth after nearly 700 years of subjugation by the Shogunate, which had exercised the real power in the country. Several fierce battles were fought between the two camps. The most bloody and the decisive one was the Battle of Ueno in which 2000 men of the Shogunate troops were badly defeated. The last Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu resigned in 1868.

Kobayashi Kiyochika had been fighting on the side of the Shogunate. He survived that time, the Bakumatsu, unharmed; but with the establishment of the new Meiji era under the rule of the Emperor Meiji, he found himself, in effect, a ronin — a lordless samurai. In the beginning he tried to survive by doing odd jobs. Later, in 1875, he tried his luck as a self-taught painter.

During that time, he happened to meet  Charles Wirgman, an English painter, cartoonist and correspondant for a British newspaper in Yokohama. Kobayashi studied art with him for a short period. Also at that time, he met Shimooka Renjo, a photographer, from whom he learned the principles of photography.

The following year, 1876, Kobayashi Kiyochika created his first woodblock prints — scenes from Tokyo. Although his prints were basically kept in traditional Japanese style, Kiyochika used Western elements like perspective, the effect of light and the graduations of shadows, having read about the French impressionists and seen photographs of their works in newspapers.

In the early 1880s, Kiyochika's style became a bit more traditional. He also turned to satirical cartoons and illustrations for newspapers and magazines. During the Sino-Japanese war he made about 80 war prints. War prints were like a last commercial resurgence of the old ukiyo-e business. Kobayashi's war prints are regarded as among the best in this genre, with a masterly play on the effects of light.

In 1894, Kiyochika established his own art school. One of his students was Tsuchiya Koitsu who stayed in his master's home for 19 years. Today Kobayashi is considered as the last master of the “old” ukiyo-e. But he was more than that. He was able to combine traditional ukiyo-e with modern Western style and thus showed a new direction for a subsequent generation of young artists like Hasui Kawase or Hiroshi Yoshida.

Despite his efforts, he could not stop the commercial decline of ukiyo-e, but he did pave the way for a new renaissance of the Japanese print - the Shin Hanga movement.