Sunday 17 November 2013

Looks familar? The art of borrowing

                                                   

Oscar Wilde once famously said to J.M. Whistler, 'I wish that I'd said that, Jimmie,' to which Whistler replied, 'You will, Oscar, you will.' Wilde knew a good idea when he saw one, as many other artists and writers have done, (and many could improve on them). Where borrowing stops and plagiarism begins is another thing. Hiroshi Yoshida (above) just about gets away with it with his witty addition of a tent and campfire. I just cannot believe he didn't know that William Giles wasn't an avid camper. Hence the mountain campsite. William and Ada Giles presumably went to Corsica
before the first war and Giles came up with his 'venturesome' The last glow, central Corsica in 1915, some while before Yoshida would have been busy with his brush.


I suppose with Japan's unique reproductive system of making prints, anyone's work was regarded as fair game. Even so, Yoshida's borrowing is so blatant, it takes your breath away, and I can well understand why Giles became so indignant about European artists like Elizabeth Keith co-operating with Tokyo publishers. He might have had a point when it came to Charles Bartlett, who worked for Wantanabe from 1915 (Yoshida also provided designs for Wantanabe later on) and a couple of years afterwards came up with his little masterpiece, Silk merchants, India which owes quite alot to a great masterpiece - I mean, Georges Seurat's A Sunday afternoon on the island of the Grand Jatte.
                                                                      

Surprising, I know, but nevertheless true. You only need to compare the seated turbanned figures to see what I mean. But what Bartlett really nicked from Seurat was the theme and tone of the work. Bartlett, no doubt, had the excuse that colour woodcut wasn't his main work and it certainly makes you wonder about those people who pay so much for them now. But then, I also think that's printmaking for you, and in many ways adapting Seurat to an Indian setting was in itself an original thing to do.
                                                                             

Nor was he alone in making good use of Seurat. S.G. Boxsius had such a habit of using other people's work, whether prints, paintings or photographs, it really just became a part of what he did. I think partly in his case he must have learned the habit early on as the youngest brother of six. Imitation just becomes second nature, as I know, being the youngest myself.
                                                                   

You might find some of this a bit tenuous, but there is circumstantial evidence, as they say, to kind of back this up. So, I am sure that Boxsius was well-acquainted with Seurat's other masterpiece, Bathers, Asnieres when he came to make his marvellous little print, Seaside. I have talked before about a photograph of Boxsius teaching at Bolt Court surrounded by the casts of classical statuary the students had to draw. Copying was a standard part of the system, to the extent that Frank Brangwyn complained that the art schools only turned out 'clever imitators' (instead of brazen polymaths like him).
                                                                        

Even more than Bartlett, I think Boxsius made exceptional use of Seurat. Seaside is not great art, but I love it all the same, and it is fascinating to see an art teacher taking his own lessons to heart by looking hard at other artist's pictures and learning something from them. Personally, it is no surprise to me that Boxsius fell for Bathers, Asnieres. I have been gazing at it in the National Gallery in London ever since I was eighteen. Boxsius, for me, is an affordable Seurat, basically.
                                                                               

S.G.B. was also very deft when it came to Sidney Lee, but Lee himself was no slouch when it came to nicking stuff. Unaccountably, he turned Hokusai's image around, losing the crucial oban shape and sometimes even more unaccountably leaving the moon out altogether when he made his daytime versions. The moon and the separation of the principal  figures was the whole point of the picture, but never mind, I admire old Sidney for having a go. Hokusai's print reads from bottom  to top, but Lee's lacks focus and reads all over the show.


Lee had a collection of Japanese prints and was, in fact, the first British printmaker to make such direct use of Japanese colour woodcut. Unfortunately, Lee rather spoiled it all by attempting to put himself above all that by insisting artists looked too much at the Old Masters. Perhaps Lee didn't include Hokusai amongst them. But then, Lee is easy to mock, partly because he is in some ways, an unsympathetic artist. But if he took ideas from other artists, at his best he was full of good ideas himself, and other artists recognised that. He certainly believed in himself.
                                                                                   

                                                        


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15 comments:

  1. An interesting posting. I never would have made the link to Seurats compositions although his Bathers was discussed extensively on the BBC not long ago. Recognizing related (borrowed) themes and compositions proof of a huge cerebral database and very sound internal linking capabilities. Gerrie

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    1. I think Boxsius was interested in Seurat's use of scale. He took a very large painting as a model and made a much smaller print, but retained Seurat's monumentality. When you see the Boxsius in front of you, you understand his achievement, and for anyone who knows Seurat, the complimentary nature of Boxsius prints becomes obvious.

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    2. Both succeeded very well in creating an air of slowness and reflection. In a different scale. That's maybe why they both are so appealing to this day. The one head inBoxius' print that is not turned away from but directly towards the viewer without any facial features is a most intriguing element. Placing it in middle of the wedged centre of light an element reminding me of Leonardo's Last Supper leaving me to want to know: who is she ?

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    3. It's Daisy Boxsius, and that's him on the right. It's just an unpretentious holiday snapshot.

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  2. Gerrie says it all!
    Enjoyed this a lot!

    Klaus

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    1. Hello Klaus, it’s also the joy of piecing together all those scattered fragments gradually unfolding a broader view lined with context. With bits and bites and braines. Seeing Boxius' beach, which I didn't know, my first impulsive and involuntary association was: Kanea Yamamoto and later also came Paul Gaguin and Henri Rivière.

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  3. I'm glad you enjoyed it, Klaus. I had forgotten that this was not the first time Hiroshi Yoshida had appeared on Modern Printmakers. Some while ago you drew a just comparison between Yoshida's 'Three little islands' (1930) and Thiemann's 'Abend' (1921). We tend to forget that Japanese artists were borrowing equally freely from the West. Shozaburo Wantanabe had been used to selling prints in the West from the earliest days and the Yoshida brothers, along with Elizabeth Keith, were two of his most loyal artists. Not everyone was.

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  4. Yes, Charles, right you are: there was a reciprocal influence. In my opinion Riviere and Hasui are two other artists in whose works similarities are obvious. Also in this case, the European was first. And Elizabeth Keith made a print in which swallows appear that are a spitting image of those in an (earlier) Koson design. So there are quire a few examples. The Yoshidas, by the way, were not brothers: Hiroshi was Toshi's father and (to be painfully honest) by far the better artist.Just look at "Three Little Islands"... And he was not that loyal to Watanabe: as a matter of fact, he started publishing his prints by himself at a rather early point in his career...

    Klaus

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  5. The world is full of these sorts of book that draw general comparisons between Western and Japanese art without actually tracing the actual story of who used what and why. I mean, I do know more about both Boxsius and Bartlett's reasons, but that will have to wait for another day.

    But the way artists came up with their images is often complex. I always think Bartlett's Indian images are better than his Japanese ones, that he is better when using a Western idiom than a Japanese one. You just tend to think he understood Seurat better than Hokusai, whereas Ethel Kirkpatrick's appropriation of Hiroshige can be subtle. She understood the evocative symbolism of Japanese prints and picked up their melancholy. She also saw that the Japanese artists were just as good at capturing mood as making innovations in design.

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  6. Yoshida's print, "Tsurigizan, Morning," was printed in 1926, so Giles' print certainly proceeds it. And since Yoshida was a world traveler and had visited Europe in the early 1920s, it is conceivable that he had seen Giles' print then. But while he did not start to collaborate with Watanabe until 1920 (or open his own woodblock print studio until 1925), he was making prints on his own at least as early as 1911, contributing woodblock prints to various sketchtour books issued in the early teens.

    Yoshida was also a life-long mountain climbing enthusiast, usually making annual trips to the Japanese Alps every summer in which he would sketch and produce oil paintings (and to other mountains around the world when he traveled - the Himalayas, the European Alps, etc.). He was doing this before Giles' print and those earlier paintings show similar perspectives. Personally, I think the similarities are coincidental, and that the Tsurugisan print merely reflects the topography of his campsite on his 1926 mountain climbing trip. (That's not to say there weren't other influences on Yoshida's prints in general, but those are left for another day.)

    Bartlett is an entirely different kettle of fish. I have never thought of comparing his Silk Merchants, India print design to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte before, but I can agree that Seurat (and certainly pointillism in general) was an influence on his painting. Bartlett was at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1886 and could have seen Seurat's painting when it was exhibited at the Société des Artistes that year. But even if he didn't, he spent a good deal of the next 27 years in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and undoubtedly became familiar with it (and other Seurat paintings) at some point.

    In fact, Bartlett's entrance submission to the Royal Academy in London circa 1883 were four pencil drawings of the Venus de Milo and the head of Ajax, done pointillisticly. I have them hanging in my guest bedroom and they are of photo-realistic quality. While he engaged in a variety of painting styles over his lifetime, some of the paintings in my collection are also painted pointillisticly, most notably Bartlett's self-portrait of 1933.

    Of course, the similarity between Bartlett's Silk Merchant print and Seurat's work is not the use of pointillism (there is none) but the depiction of light and shadow in general, and a setting that coincidentally features trees and mostly faceless seated people. (Bartlett could certainly paint or draw faces well if he wanted to -- his best portraits rival John Singer Sargent’s, but that wasn’t what he was concerned about in this particular design.)

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    1. I think there is a general point here that you have missed: artists make use of other artists and it's often entertaining for readers to see the ways they go about that. I can only suggest as much in a short post like this. But I know more about the subject and Bartlett has already had a post to himself.

      So far as individuals go, Giles also made use of other artists, notably Fletcher. but Salaman made the point that he was too independent and original an artist to be glibly making use of others. The trend was for Giles to be made use of. Again, this has already been covered in a post about a series of swan images by Giles. Carl Thiemann and Hans Neumann.

      The real problem is that we don't have enough documentation about any of these artists to be conclusive but posts like these are intended to open up discussion. But I don't believe the Yoshida/Giles connection is coincidental. Admittedly, I don't know much about Yoshida but I do know that it was the use of bright colour (and in this case that pink) that helps make Giles distinctive and that Yoshida made use of here.

      As for Bartlett, yes, I am well aware of his movements even though I don't say what they were in the post. 'Silk Merchants' is clearly based on Seurat and shows just how well he knew the painting. As always with Seurat, it's the disposition of figures and use of light and perspective that other artists were interested in as much as the technique. The fact is Seurat was a far superior artist to Bartlett and Wantanabe was looking for work using a European idiom that would appeal to western customers. The fact that he made drawings in India before he arrived in Japan doesn't mean a lot. As I've already said to you Bartlett had neighbours in London who were making colour woodcuts before he left and none of us know what his intentions were when he was making watercolours in India, but Bartlett's transposition of Seurat to India and Wantanabe's publication of an India set of colour woodblocks were both interesting and original things to do. The fact that William Giles and I don't really rate much of what Wantanabe was doing with Western artists is by the by, I suppose.

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  7. The problem I have with the analysis is that Bartlett wasn’t a woodblock print artist like Mabel Royds -- he was only a woodblock print designer. (He was an etcher, but he did not carve or print his woodblock prints.) All of his woodblock prints (and all his etchings, for that matter) appear to be based on his oil paintings or watercolors. Admittedly, after his initial collaboration with Watanabe, he might have composed some paintings with the possible expectation that they might thereafter be turned into woodblock prints. But his first ten Indian scene prints (and one print of Ceylon) were based on paintings that Bartlett did before he arrived in Japan and was introduced to Watanabe Shozaburo. They were painted with no foreknowledge that they might become woodblock prints, and selected by Watanabe out of all the paintings that Bartlett had composed during his travels to India and Pakistan because they were deemed most suitable for reproduction/translation into the woodblock print medium. As it turned out, they translated well to the woodblock print medium (better, as you say, than most of Bartlett’s Japanese scenes) because the paintings were all about color and light and, of course, they had no real Japanese precedessors to compete with. (Although I think some of Yoshida’s best work are certain prints in his own India series, his debt to Bartlett and Watanabe is palpable.) So, if you see Seurat’s influence in Bartlett’s prints), it’s only Seurat’s influence on Bartlett’s paintings that you are seeing (and that of Rembrandt and Brangwyn, among other artists).

    If you want to see a print I feel was influence by Bartlett, check out Ada Louise Collier’s Sweet Market, Tangier: http://www.williampcarlfineprints.com/prints/colliersweetmarket.jpg

    The prices for Bartlett’s prints are insane, especially his Hawaiian prints since Hawaiian art is particularly a hot market at the moment. But Bartlett’s prints hold an important place in Japanese printmaking being among the earliest and most successful designs of Watanabe’s initial foray into the shin hanga area. Watanabe’s printers and carvers were at their peak during the 1915-1923 period, the golden age of twentieth century Japanese printmaking. Viewed in comparison with other prints by Hasui, Shinsui, and Capelari issued during the same period, they are a bargain.

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  8. Hello I read this article and recognised the image [the bathers[ before reading it fully. In Bollings raisonne of Laura Knight it is there with the foregrounds figures colours reversed. Who copied who?

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  9. I don't know which Laura Knight you mean, but Seurat's 'Bathers' was painted in 1884 and acquired by the National Gallery, London, in 1924, so presumably Knight saw it there. Do you know the title of Knight's picture?

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  10. Oops am a slow reader. Its titled On the seashore. 1921/22 linocut actual size 4.25 x 7 ins

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