Summer holidays

                                                                             

Modern Printmakers will be on holiday from today for a week, so there  may  be a delay to replying to comments. Please leave them all the same for other readers.
                                                                          

A Sussex wave from Japan, the colour woodcuts of Eric Slater & Arthur Rigden Read: Hastings Museum and Art Gallery

                                                                                                             

                                                                                
In 1934 a friend of Arthur Rigden Read gave fifteen of his colour woodcuts to Hastings Art Gallery and I assume the fifteen colour woodcuts form the basis for the current exhibition at Hastings, but which also includes work by Urushibara, John Platt,  Eric Slater and Frank Morley Fletcher, an interesting mix of colour woodcut artists who all  made use of the Japanese method, hence the title of the exhibition.

                                                                                   

Eric Slater was nowhere near as good a printmaker as Read, but he will help to bring in the crowds. It would be fair to say they formed a local school of sorts in the late twenties and thirties, but the Reads lived in Sussex for twenty years only and many of his subjects were French or Londoners or people like the Romanies who came from nowhere, so it's a shame curators try to give a minor artist this duff local slant. Read may be minor but he deserves better. As does his wife, who appears in a number of his woodcuts.
                                                                              

The show runs from 27th May to 3rd September and will appeal to the summer crowds as well as local cognoscenti. It will be worth going simply because I know that the bequest includes a number of prints that are rare enough to be unavailable anywhere online. Certainly I have never seen  some of them, but they have not been included in the booklet that has been published to coincide with the exhibition. But the less said about that little effort the better.

Yoshijiro Urushibara, a Japanese printmaker in London: Hilary Chapman & Libby Horner

                        
                                                                          

The problem with quite a few people who write about art is that they do not know how to look at pictures and they do not know how to look at pictures, because they have not looked at enough of them and do not know their  Manet from their Mategna. This may not always matter all that much, but in the case of the subject of this book, he was not only Japanese, he had been trained to work in the style of other artists, and then worked with many artists in France and Britain and no-one is more nuanced than Yoshijiro Urushibara. Ignore this at your peril. Unfortunately, the authors do.

                                                          

But there is more. It is imperative, if you want to study any artist properly, to have a chronology of their work and, basically, a catalogue like this ought to do the job. What is lacking with Urishibara is an adequate number of dates for many of his prints and no amount of other detail can make this book do what it says it does. In that case, why did they try? And the answer is, 'Because they wanted to'.

                                                                           

They are not the only writers to divide a catalogue into rather naff sections like 'Florals' and 'Creatures'; Dominique Vasseur inflicted the same indignity on poor Edna Boies Hopkins in 2007, but what else could they do?  The predicament was a predicament of their own making, but producing a catalogue is one way of avoiding too many critical judgements, except of the very obvious sort. All we get is Chapman saying she believed the work he did with Brangwyn was his best. She doesn't explain why, so I needn't say why I disagree (although I think earlier work like 'Ruins of a Roman Bridge' are very good): what you see here is what he did best.

                                                                         

Obviously, not only these; there are others, but I have written about Urushibara's prints elsewhere on Modern Printmakers. Libby Horners' essay on the artist is very good and well-researched though some material is still missing. Hilary Chapman's essay 'Urushibara and the British colour woodcut in the Japanese manner' is thirty years out-of-date and counting. Why bother?

                                                                             

One criticism that has been made about  this book concerns the size of the illustrations. The standard of photography is good and I would say that everything you want to see is there, along with a lot of things you would not want to, minor work after Frank Brangwyn being my own bugbear. It's the same with the text in the main catalogue, which has you wading through details  about exhibitions and incomprehensible lettering. If you enjoy flipping backwards and forwards, this may well be the book for you. This is a missed opportunity to do Urushibara justice. The authors only had to look at Robert Meyrick's 'Sydney Lee' of 2013 to see how this new book should have been done, but  this is all we have and I am afraid Chapman & Horler will be the standard text, whether we like it or not.

                                                                              

For a different view of the book, read Darrel Karl's insider take on things on 'Eastern Impressions'

Ken Hoshino

                            
                                                                       

As it is Urushibara week, I offer this post on the scholar and dealer, Ken Hoshino, as my contribution. Hoshino was born in Japan but  left in 1898 to study at Columbia University in  New York City. Following graduation, he then moved to London where he eventually set up a business selling prints on Chancery Lane.

                                                                                

He was in business by 1907 when he sold 23 images to the British Museum. The woodblock by Utagawa Yotohiro (top) was one of them and the image of fighting during the Sino-Japanese War by Gessa  c1904  (below) was another. In between them  there is a 1912 advert from the Froebel Society Journal for the popular bird and flower prints. (I await identification  and I am not  going to put much money on Koson).

                                                                                      

Hoshino's London career came to an end shortly afterwards. He fell ill and returned to Japan, leaving the business in the hands of a British employee who ran it until the end of the first war, when Ken's nephew, Hiroshi, came to London and instead of selling prints, imported Japanese celluloid toys, which were passed on to East London traders at considerable profit. Such is life.
                                                                                      

It was this later period that is perhaps of most interest to Modern Printmakers. In 1910, William Giles produced a colour print of Stonehenge (below) based on a series of drawings he had made and in its turn, this became the basis for a colour woodcut by Urushibara, or, rather, a series of colour woodcuts where the Japanese artist built on the variants Giles himself had made. The whole process for Giles had been a complex one of selection where many of the esoteric overtones of the sketches and etchings he made, were removed.
                                                                            

Urushibara's images were made some time around 1912 or so. Many are signed and are quite clearly colour woodcuts, but at some point at least two different images were published by Ken Hoshino and Co. According to the Japanese Gallery the Hoshino Stonehenge print they had for sale was a lithograph. It had a chop-mark like the one you see here and an inscription (see below)  but no signature.  I have never seen one of these Hoshino prints, so I am  not going to go in for any guesswork or conjecture. It's  interesting all the same to see Urushibara taking a commercial approach (as his old employers did in Tokyo) at a stage where he was beginning to make prints of his own. It was not untill 1920 that The bamboo vase, his first truly independent colour woodcut, was first exhibited in London. It was a long apprenticeship but there is a process here, I think, and an acute one.

                                                                  

Yoshijiro Urushibara, a Japanese printmaker in London: Hilary Chapman and Libby Horner

                                                                          

It was in the nature of things, I suppose, that  Yoshijiro Urushibara went to live somewhere on the boundaries of Holland Park and Notting  Hill  (according to which source you go to) when he first came to live in London. Never an easy printmaker to get  quite right, the first attempt to locate this intriguing artisan-printmaker, teacher and friend has been made by Hilary Chapman and Libby Horner in this book published in  May, 2017. It is essentially a catalogue of his prints and includes essays and other biographical material.

                                                                             

My thanks are due to Darrel Karl who alerted me to the publication on his blog and who  helped the authors with his considerable expertise. (The link is on my list). I will be reviewing the book once my copy arrives.

                                                                          

Some colour woodcuts on British ebay

                                                                                    

There has been such a dearth of good colour woodcuts on British ebay for such a long time, I began to wonder whether anything decent would ever appear. Kenneth Broad's pair of nursery printsare now for sale and they are good, but we have seen them more than once before and, what is more,  I remember the way they set the whole show rolling when Clive Christie bought them soon after he had started his old blog 'Art and the Aesthete'. Arthur Rigden Read's virtuoso Stormy seas has never appeared on British ebay. The only image available online until very recently was one lifted from The Studio, a 1920s reproduction that did Read's print little justice.

                                                                           

Stormy seas is not Read at his very best. It owes a lot to Hans Frank's 'Seagulls' of 1924 although in many ways, it's the better print. Read was never averse to pinching good ideas and often made witty use of other artists but he had a weakness for birds and they failed to bring out the best in him. 'May morning' was an early exception; for all its bravura and undoubted skill, Stormy seas is seascape and Read just wasn't any good at landscape and was wise enough to avoid it and concentrate on figure subjects or still life. Am I being too critical? I don't think so, because when Read's prints were good, they were very good indeed, he just wasn't a good enough artist to avoid a hackneyed image like this one. That aside, the sense of the waves and the play of white and green is pretty sensational really and very clever. The print makes a very rare use in British colour woodcut of the technique known in Japan as karazuri or shallow embossing. You can make out what is happening on the detail at the top. And in case, you dod not recognise this image I have used here from its recent appearance, it's because the proof you see here belongs to Gerrie Caspers from The Linosaurus, so many thanks to him for a superior photograph.
                                                                             

Far more of a surprise for me was the appearance of Phillip Needell's The mill at Cley. I'd never seen this before and was not at all aware that Needell could turn out anything as good as this. It is just as conventional as the Read but unlike Read, Needell understood the conventions of landscape art well enough to come up with this pleasing and delicate image. If it owes quite a lot to French artists like Henri Riviere or Lucien Pissarro, the way he has broken the image down into a series of marks is surprisingly modern for him. We could have done with more of that and less of the mill. It is certainly far more satisfying than E.A. Verpilleux's lurid treatment of the same subject. At £200, it was not a bad buy either and I was expecting it to fetch more.
                                                                       

 

Needell and his wife spent a lot of time in France, especially after his retirement. The sketchy understatement, the delicacy of mood and poetry of space recalls personal favourites like Corot and Seurat and it shows how much an artist who lacked thorough training as Needell did, could nevertheless respond to great artists and make something satisfying of his own. I only wish he has done more like this. Or perhaps he did and we still haven't seen them.
                                                                

Hugo Noske has never really been on my radar and has never had a post to himself on Modern Printmakers but why this fruity autumnal image remained unsold the other night, is just beyond me. The colour is rich, the description of dahlias, rudbeckia, helenium and montbretia is apt and frisky and it would look better on a wall than either the Read or Needell.  Not evocative enough, I suppose, no real sense of the collectable about it, that would be it. Solid, yes, but all the same, I think it's rather glorious.

 

Oskar Laske, the White Angel Apothecary & mosaic

                                                                         

As soon as I read the comment left by Andreas this morning about Oskar Laske, I knew I had a lead for another post. And here it is. But the result is unexpected.

Laske began his professional life as an architect. His father (also Oskar) had been an architect in Czernowitz and young Oskar began training in fine art in Vienna when he was about thirteen before moving to the Technische Hochschule, a leading school of modern architecture and design at the age of eighteen. Six years later, he moved on to the Academy where Otto Wagner was director and then began to practice. It was not to last very long.
                                                            

The designs for the White Angel Apothecary at 8, Bognorstrasse, were made soon afterwards between 1901 and 1902. The mosaics he had made for the façade suggest why his career in architecture might have been such a short one. There is something abnormal about his angels; they are too overstated and imaginative for a pharmacy and too much like a pair of dragonflies.
                                                                  

I suggested in the last post they he must have visited Istanbul by about 1910 but the mosaics begin to make me think he had visited while still a student. The C11th image above shows Empress Zoe, the wife of Constantine IX, in what was then the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople.

                                                                        
Laske was not the only Viennese artist to make use of mosaic. Gustav Klimt incorporated them into his designs for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, which was built after Laske's designs had been made. What I do think is Laske responded to mosaic in a way that Klimt did not. Byzantine art remains a kind of  lost aspect of European art, anomalous but one of tremendous craftsmanship and tremendous feeling.
                                                                     

 

 

Klimt adapted the old technique with verve and imagination but Laske's paintings owe just as much to the example of mosaic but lead off in an other direction, well away from the impressiveness of the great mosaics of Ravenna and Damascus and others like these marvellous apostles at St Michael in Chora in Istanbul. Andreas also mentioned a trip Laske made with Emma Bormann to Sicily and Tunisia organised by the University of Vienna in 1913. I have to assume again that one good reason for going as far as Sicily was to see the mosaics in Palermo and at Monreale. Here he is as a soldier-artist about three years afterwards. Now have a second look at Zoe's eyes and face.