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.

The shin hanga woodcuts of Cyrus Leroy Baldridge

During the twenties, the American illustrator, Cyrus Leroy Baldridge and his wife, Caroline Singer, travelled extensively in the east, arriving in Pekin some time in 1924 or 1925. While there he made various watercolours and drawings of the walls and precincts of the old city. When the couple moved on to Tokyo, they met the print publisher Shozaburo Wantanabe who had already worked with a small number of Western artists as well as artists from Japan. As some of you will already know, I am not a great fan of any of the work Wantanabe did with his Western artists but what they were doing was always interesting and Baldridge in particular is nowhere near as expensive as Elizabeth Keith or Charles Bartlett.

In 1915 Wantanabe had had his first great success with Goyo Hashiguchi's Woman in a bathroom and came up with the term shin hanga, or new print, as a way of marketing his artists. Sadly artists like Hashiguchi were not only talented, they were also disloyal and soon went off, found craftsmen to make their prints and published them themselves. This was not an option for Western artists like Bartlett and Keith and as they arrived in Tokyo, Wantanabe nobbled them and set them to work making prints for him. Keith didn't even like being in Japan and always preferred Korea, China and Moro Island, but Tokyo was where the work was.

Not all that long before Baldridge and Singer arrived Wantanabe's publishing business had been struck by disaster. On 1st September, 1923, Honshu Island was subjected to a devastating earthquake and many of the blocks that Wantanabe's craftsmen had made, including all of Keith's, had been destroyed.  Keith was still working with him when Baldridge arrived and so far as I can see, he was the last of the Westerners to be taken up by Wantanabe. By my reckoning there was a portfolio of six prints only published in 1925. As you can see from Peking Market (above) there were all on japan and I believe came in editions of 200. All were inscribed by Baldridge but not always with the full title. You might just get 'Peking 25' and at least one of them is inscribed no. 204. Many people also credit Singer but I have no idea what she actually did.

Going by the watercolour of Peking South Gate, the studio didn't always do Baldridge's work justice. I assume Wantanabe chose the subjects and Baldridge worked on the designs for the block-cutter. Six was the number of prints he had used when Bartlett worked in Tokyo and all the prints Baldridge made are here, including Evening Peking (top) and Peking - Pailou (second down). As late as autumn 1954, Baldridge had a show of prints at the California State Library at Sacramento when he still had prints for sale. This barely seems credible today but the majority were drypoints and going by the list (above) the six colour woodcuts of Peking were all he ever made. So far as I am aware no one has put this definitive Sacramento catalogue and all the images together in one place before.

But where did the idea come from? The subjects are similar to the ones chosen by the British artist, Katharine Jowett, who began  making colour linocuts of the old city some time during the twenties. Coal Hill (second and third above) was not only common to both artists, the view is identical, with Baldridge's print only deeper in order to conform with the oban sheet. This is very curious and suggests one print was copied from the other. But there is more. Some of my readers are fortunate enough to own a proof of Isabel de B. Lockyer's superior linocut Chateau de Blonay from 1924 (first above) and will note the similarity between Baldridge's Coal Hill and de B. Lockyer's image. Whether Jowett was making linocuts by 1925 no one knows. The choice of the ancient city as a subject may seem an obvious one, but Keith never bothered with this topographical approach. Nor did anyone else, including Bertha Lum, who spent long periods working in the city.  The Hanga Gallery (where a lot of these images come from) in Durham, North Carolina (and, no, they don't have any for sale) give only five titles, but this must be wrong. The other two are Peking Winter (below) and Peking South Gate (bottom).

All were produced in the old oban size and vary in their effectiveness. Peking Winter is the best of the lot for my money, but as I have never seem any of them in front of me, it is wise not to be too judgemental. I am sure all were made to the highest standards but Wantanabe's craftsmen varied their approach between intensive use of keyblock and hardly any. A number I think are flat but will certainly look better once you see them. But that is Baldridge anyway, an illustrator making use of the loquacious, muscular style popular in the U.S. between the wars and it tends to jar. They certainly capture the atmosphere of an oriental city despite that. Take away the style of the architecture and the scenes he depicts could be anywhere in the great cities of northern Morocco and the choice of twilight and different times of year is astute, subtle and telling. You just have to decide whether or not you like them. One thing I will say is, though, you wont be finding any of them at Camden Market or on the Portobello Road.

In a day or two I will be adding a second post about the watercolours and drawings following the comment made below by Scott Williams.

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.