At the end of the Pacific portion of World War II, Japan was occupied by the wartime Allies, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, began a cleanup. Many were the calls for reform and much was the censorship.
Economics, politics, jurisprudence, all were swept clean by the SCAP broom, and yet its promulgations only rarely affected the arts. Film and literature were subjected to some censorship, but painting, drawing and printmaking, hardly at all.
Various businessmen were tried for supporting Japan's militaristic wartime policies, but painters who were equally complicit were never called to account. Indeed, such wartime activities are even now usually left out of their official biographies. Taikan Yokoyama, who had even (among much else) delivered lectures on the spirit of Japanese art to visiting groups of Hitler youths, continued to exhibit after the war just as though nothing had happened. (It is worth remembering, however, that in their wartime military support Japanese artists were little different from those abroad. The dubious aims of France's Vichy government, for example, were actively supported by Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Aristide Maillol and many others, all of whose reputations survived unscathed.)
The Occupation did, nonetheless, have some effect. Traditional-style nihonga painters were among the most enthusiastic supporters of militarism, and they now found both themselves and their art proscribed -- not so much by SCAP authorities as by that portion of the population that still supported art. One of their number asserted that "the path taken by nihonga can only collide with the lives we lead now."
These lives were indeed different from those the Japanese led in wartime. Though postwar Japan was for a time equally spartan, people were now encouraged to think optimistically about individualism and democracy. Art was to be progressive, open, free.
This was an aim for which both oil painting and nihonga were ill equipped. Both had developed a very literal naturalism to satisfy the simplicities of wartime propaganda, and now this hitherto reigning style was suddenly taboo. Much more adaptable and attractive were styles and techniques that did not, could not, aspire to this kind of realism.
Among these was the art of the woodblock print. Woodblock-print artists, to be sure, had supported the war effort just as fervently as anyone else, but their work was not commonly considered an "official" representation, unlike military-themed oil painting. (This suffered from such a taboo in the postwar period that it was only last year that Tsuguji (Leonard) Fujita's large rendering of the fall of Saipan was allowed public viewing.)
Woodblock-print artists were thus in an advantageous position. Perceived as militaristically untainted, they also used much simpler means than oil painters (who had great difficulty obtaining materials) and they made demotic multiples rather than elitist "singles." Further, their lighter colors (postwar Japanese prints used all sorts of pastel shades hitherto uncommon) and their more easily comprehended structure carried with it, however speciously, some idea of a popular art.
From these beginnings rose one of the most important genres of postwar Japanese art. This rise is here generously chronicled by Lawrence Smith, former keeper (chief curator) of Japanese antiquities at the British Museum and author of both "Modern Japanese Prints: 1912-1989" and "The Japanese Print Since 1900." He examines in detail the school of printmakers, led by Koshiro Onchi, that survived the war and found itself searching for a new Japanese aesthetic.
Typical of the new work was a late-1945 series of views of Tokyo, a collection that followed the famed cycles of Hokusai and Hiroshige, but at the same brought the idea up to date. Though there was some borrowing from a prewar series of Tokyo views, these later glimpses of the city were executed in a manner more apparent, more simplified, more "sunny."
The new woodblock print also showed the influence of art from abroad. Shortly Onchi was to turn to entirely abstract means, and many other woodblock-print artists followed his lead.
At the same time, their prints were attracting the favorable attention of at least several of the occupiers. Among these the most important was the American graphic artist Ernst Hacker, who befriended the group and was a close friend of Onchi and others of the circle, including the then almost unknown Shiko Munakata. Later William Hartnett, Oliver Statler and others wrote about the modern Japanese print and arranged for showings abroad.
It is, indeed, to just such an exhibition that we owe this admirable book. It was intended to support a showing of the Hacker archive (prints and photos), which was recently given to the British Museum in London. The exhibition closed last month, but we may still admire it in this unstinting volume depicting a remarkable moment in Japanese art -- the emergence of a new kind of woodblock print that can now be seen as the legitimate successor to traditional ukiyo-e.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.