Ohara Koson: prints & signatures

 

Recently I advised readers to mug up on the signature of the Japanese artist and printmaker, Ohara Koson. All very well, but it is not as straightforward as that, but nevertheless well worth the try. Koson in fact used three different signatures at different stages of his career and I am going to include an illustration of the different kinds he used. Even here though it isn't foolproof because script and seal on prints I own diverge from the ones illustrated although not all that much.

Here is a general rule-of-thumb from someone who has been picking up the odd Koson print for many years. Koson worked in the kacho-e genre (or bird and flowers) as Allen Seaby and Hans Frank did. Once you have the bird subject, you only have to look at the signature to get the general idea because it doesn't alter all that much. When I found the eagle (top) in an antiques centre in the 1980s, I showed it to my students from Hong Kong who read it as go-don. What does alter is the manner.The lapwing (below) which I picked up in Caernarfon two or three years ago apparently dates from 1930 and has a noticeably sparer and more modern style than others. As I said, sometimes the tonality of the print is different. a

One thing you will need to accept is that the prints wont always be in good condition. My eagle is not only laid down on thick card, the card (and print) is dented from the back. But then it only cost me a tenner and it is currently on sale in London for £450. What's not to like? Some are scratched, some are stained. I think so long as they aren't faded, it doesn't matter. I also own the pair of geese (second from the top) and the paper is rather burnt, something I try my best to ignore. Koson was a great designer who was consistent and varied. This is what we need to bear in mind. You don't say to yourself, 'Do I like this one?' You just buy it. And on the plus side you can still find them in period frames.

Koson trained as a fine artist and went on to teach at the Tokyo School of Fine Art. In Tokyo he met the American scholar and orientalist, Ernest Fenellosa, who had returned to Japan to work in 1897. He left for good in 1900 and some time before that encouraged Koson to take up traditional forms, including woodblock. Koson worked with his first publisher, Daikokuya, from about 1904 to 1905 but returned to painting in 1912 when he adopted the name Shoson. Inevitably perhaps in 1926 he began working with Shozaburo Wantanabe (and continued to work under the name Shoson, the signature you will most commonly see). This was an important career move for two reasons. Wantanabe had first worked in the print export field and now all his prints were sold in large numbers in the United States and Europe. Wantanabe also believed Japanese woodblock had degenerated because the carvers and printers had stopped working in collaboration with designers, leaving the prints looking stereotyped and lifeless. This approach was borne out by Elizabeth Keith who was dumbfounded to find the carvers reproduced every small mistake she made. But it was no different for the artisans who were appalled by the way Keith broke with tradition.

But Wantanabe knew what he was doing. Not only was his wife the daughter of a carver, he was also a master of publicity and the year Koson went to work for him an account praising the working practices of his studio and written by the Japanese art historian, Jiro Harada, appeared in The Studio magazine. Eventually, Koson made designs for 500 kacho-e prints, all of them exported, which explains why you can still find a pair of them in north Wales for sale at £37 in 2018 - and I thought that was each. Yet it was not only a matter of large numbers. Another reason the prints may have survived in such good basic condition were the standards used in Wantanabe's workshops. Having supplied different kinds of wood to his carvers, he settled on wild cherry, the wood publishers had used in the old days, and his printers worked with good quality inks and fine hosho paper. Workshops had been adapting Western styles and techniques for a long time. While training in Tokyo, Yoshijiro Urushibara had learned to engrave on boxwood to prevent the fine detail from wearing after long print runs. Admittedly there are many prints by Koson that will look cloying to some. There are many more that do not and the ones that diverge subtly from standard practice like the irises (above) and are printed on a square sheet rather than oban, can be some of the most appealing. To ourselves, it still looks very Japanese. I have no doubt to a Japanese collector of the 1930s, it would have seemed a travesty.