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.

Gesso Yoshimoto (1881 - 1935)

Going on with the short series of posts on affordable colour woodcutters, we come to the accomplished artist, Gesso Yoshimoto, and prints he made like Cuckoo in the rain (above). A classic shin hanga or new print artist of the 1920s and 1930s, not very much is known about him, but he was sufficiently well-known for the dealer and collector, Robert Muller, to have a large number of prints by him in his stock or collection at his death in 2003.

The term shin hanga was introduced by the Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe, after his first success with Goyo Hashiguchi's Woman in a bathroom in 1915. Gesso would have been thirty-three or  thirty-four by then and was soon working in a manner that very subtly combined old-style ukiyo-e woodcuts and Western descriptiveness and perspective. Like Ohara Koson, his main genre was kacho-e, meaning bird and flower prints and usually (though not always) the size of pillar prints like the ones here. Ostensibly there were designed to hang on the wooden pillars supporting Japanese homes, but many were intended for the Western market.

As Japanese artists go, Gesso was fairly conventional, but no matter. As you see, he was a colourist and designer with sensitivity and flair. The sensibility was also quite different from Koson who was bolder and more dramatic. The other difference is that you can acquire a Gesso on the open market for £125 or less, not something you could say about Koson.

At the risk of making Modern Printmakers sound like Anfield or the Derby again, I will add this. If readers have not done so already, they should familiarise themselves with the signatures of Koson and Gesso and the like. Original prints by Koson are still lying around antique centres and design shops in the UK for an asking price that is well, well below what they are worth. Within the past two or three years I bought a pair of Koson prints in a retro shop in Caernarfon for £35. Even if birds and flowers are not your thing, shin hanga made to this standard are always worth ten or twenty quid of your money. And I would not tell you wrong.  

The paintings of Ohara Koson

                                                                      

 

The role that was played by scholars and collectors like Ernest Fennellosa and Edward Morse in the revival of colour woodcut is a fascinating one. In my own view, the revival would not have happened without then, but that is another thing. Fennellosa had taught for a number of years in Japan before he returned to Boston to take up a post as curator at the Museum of Fine Art. About 1890 he met the young artist, Arthur Wesley Dow, and then introduced him to the German printmaker and scholar S.R. Koehler who had posts at both Boston and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and it was not long before Dow was making the first American colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner, which had their first exhibition in a corridor at M.F.A.
                                                                        

Then in 1895, Fennellosa was dismissed from M.F.A. following his re-marriage. (The authorities believed it came too soon after his divorce). Back in Japan, Fennellosa met another young artist called Ohara Koson who he engouraged to make colour woodcuts that would appeal to the western market (and so, presumably help with the revival). Thus began Koson's long career working with at least three different publishers who sold his work widely in the United States and Europe, a publishing campaign that was so successful it is still possible to pick up Koson prints in British antiques centres for a nominal £10 simply because people cannot recognise Japanese signatures.
                                                                                     

The collections of people like Morse and co-enthusiast, William Bigelow, were very large indeed, and eventually formed the basis of entire collections at museums like M.F.A. But these men were also scholars who were principally concerned with recording and conserving the artefacts of Japanese culture. They travelled the country for years, not only acquiring ceramics and picture, but recording archaeological sites, just as aware of the effect of modern life on the arts and crafts in Japan as the followers of William Morris were in relation to British culture.
                                              

 
What I had certainly not come across in any British junk shops were paintings by Koson of the kind you see here. I am indebted to a collector in Washington, D.C. for these. In itself, his own collection, which is destined for the Smithsonian, shows that the tradition of scholarly collecting of Japanese art is still alive and kicking in the States. Frankly, it seems astonishing to me that anyone is still able to acquire so much material like this, but then the assiduousness and erudition of good collectors should never be underestimated.
                                           

Put in this context, the production of colour woodcuts in the west looks almost like a by-product, except perhaps in Koson's case where the production of his prints was so vast you can still pick the odd one up as you as you go along. I still remember finding two in a heap of disregarded papers after a friend had died. Much of Koson's earlier work was painted on fine silk, as you can see here, though he later used paper. The silk sometimes remained unpainted so that the final effect of some of the prints at least is that much more subdued because the backgrounds were printed in grey. But even with the crow, where Koson painted the background (or the lack of it), the blacks and greys are enhanced in printing and the final effect sharper and dramatic.
                                                                                 

                                                  
What also strikes me is the different appeal of painting and woodcut. There is the effect of scale. The paintings were generally postcard size while the woodblocks were considerably larger. The two swallow images are to scale but not actual size, and do give some idea of the wide-screen effect of the woodblocks. Either way, the limited use of colour is consistent and striking. Not that this semi-monochrome approach was unique to Japan; it is widespread though less obvious in western art. The paintings have a subtle delicacy the prints forgo, but the prints gain in drama and clarity that is the essence of good graphic art anywhere.
                                                                                              

Essentially, I wanted the work to speak for itself. What I do want to express is my considerable gratitude to Darrel Karl, not just for the loans of all these images, but for his painstaking correspondence about Koson (and other artists). Please make sure to read any comments by him as they will add considerably to the little I have been able to say here.


 

 

Walther Klemm: a book of birds

Anyone who has read a dozen or so posts on the blog will have realised I have a soft spot for central European printmakers working between about 1900 and 1930. This interest began quite casually with picking up prints in salerooms, junk shops or on the Portobello Road in London during the 1980s. Carl Thiemann, Helene Mass, Englebert Lap, Paul Leschhorn, the Frank brothers, Bresslern Roth - all of them were there. You might not have been able to read their signatures, but they were always stylish and sometimes dirt-cheap. And if you had to pay, they smacked of sophistication from beyond the river Rhine. As I said in the October post, a good Walther Klemm (1883 - 1957) was hard to find.

In 1912 he published his 'Vogelbuch' a portfolio of six colour woodcuts of European birds in an edition of only 40. He had already made a book of Prague street scenes but his bird prints owe far more to the example of the Japanese. Look at the work of his contemporary, Ohara Koson (1877 - 1945). Koson, only six years his senior, had generally stopped making woodcuts under that name in 1911. Many were of birds and were widely sold in Europe. The eagle (also picked up for next to nothing) isn't really typical but you see the form: concentration on a single image, a neutral background with few details, an unsentimental approach. This one would appeal more to the ornithologist than most. I don't think Klemm's would.

Klemm wasn't a naturalist. They are birds but he was also concerned with line, form and their relationship to space. The Japanese example that he had learned through Emil Orlik, suited him very well. If he knew Koson's work - and I would think that he did - it is even more interesting. For all that, these are European prints. Koson's line is much sharper than Klemm's. The rhythms and inwardness of Klemm - look at the way he describes the feel of the feathers and the atmosphere the birds live in - are really quite foreign to the Japanese artist. By comparison, Koson is almost shockingly objective.

Klemm uses the long Japanese image to suggest the kingfisher about to dive, the ducks doing so, but the sense of violent drama in Koson's eagle print in missing.

AW Seaby is also famous for his birds. But Seaby was a naturalist and his work still appeals to ornithologists. Ten years older than Koson, there is no sense of influence here. Klemm looks alot more Japanese. Seaby's work is a portrait of a bird in its environment. This is very British. He also avoids the neutrals of both Koson and Klemm. He talked about 'the tendency of our time to enjoy colour'. He also made this print in green and the blue strikes me pretty arbitrary. Klemm thought harder about what the Japanese were actually doing and was basically more abstract in the appproach he took to his work.

I wanted to include Klemm's complete set so people could see them all together. I think this ptarmigan is undergoing psychoanalysis. There is more of a sense of the instincts in Klemm than there is in Seaby.

The play of feathers in the game bird is beautifully Klemm, vivid and a bit bizarre. He likes the way wings stretch out for us to see. It's unexpected. I always think there is a bit more to Klemm than meets the eye. I don't think you would ever say that about Seaby.

I had to finish with the more usual kind of Koson. The frailty of the blossom and the crow's terrible beak and eye are masterly. His sense that something is about to happen, of vigour, and of the fleeting moment, is beyond most European artists. (I should also add that Joseph Fach in Frankfurt-am-Main currently have 'Vogelbuch' for sale. My thanks are due to them).