Last November Clifton Karhu, Japan's most famous foreign resident artist, turned 77 years of age, and his dealer, Norman Tolman, has published this extremely handsome "tribute" to the printmaker and his work.
Karhu began working in Japan in 1963 and has now created some 1,500 prints. Mostly these have been scenes in and around Kyoto and Kanazawa. His views of the old capital have in several senses defined the ways in which we now see it.
Yet when Michiaki Kawakita, then director of the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, saw his first Karhu print, he said it was "certainly not the Kyoto that the Japanese see." Later, however, he came to understand what Karhu was doing.
"I realized that he is showing us what he alone can see -- the sturdy frame of Kyoto, the basic shapes that underline the city's elegant exterior beauty." Kawakita is thus suggesting that some Japanese see only the surface of the city, but that Karhu sees more -- the geometry beneath the surface.
It has always been there, this almost Mondrian-like grid that supports the geometry, but it's something one must learn to notice. And here the teachers have been mainly foreigners due to one of the most happy symbioses of modern art history.
The West first saw Japanese woodblock prints around the middle of the 19th century and these had a definite influence upon Western art, printmaking in particular. These new European works were then seen by Japanese abroad who were struck by both their strange familiarity and by what the foreigners had done with the native products.
In particular, they were impressed by the defining outlines of Vincent van Gogh and Georges Rouault, by the woodcuts of Ernst Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff from expressionist Germany, and -- from Scandinavia -- an entirely new print school, inspired by the Japanese and led by Edward Munch.
Karhu, an American of Finnish ancestry, is in this northern European tradition. Hence the Japanese can see in his work a style (European) that they already know, and an influence (Japanese) that they recognize. One of the reasons for Karhu's acceptance by the Japanese is that he meets their tradition on its way back, as it were, from northern Europe.
Another is the transformation of the familiar. Karhu's Kyoto is (despite the brilliant color often used) very much a northern capital. Anyone otherwise ignorant might guess it to be at the same latitude as Sapporo.
One reason is that the unprinted area -- the color of the paper itself, in Karhu's case white -- is prized by any printmaker and putting it to skillful use is one of his most intense pleasures. Another reason is that Karhu himself comes from the snow country of Minnesota. Also, the look of a Karhu print is sometimes, with its sturdy lines and narrow interstices, close to that of mingei folk art, itself from Tohoku in the far north.
All northern architecture tends to fill up its wide, empty spaces with lines. It is this perhaps that gives Karhu's Kyoto-Helsinki its Munch-like look, which the Japanese so rightly prize.
Karhu also is the last of a line. He has elsewhere written that what he has found wonderful about Japan is changing and will shortly disappear forever. "When Japan heedlessly throws away the treasures of the past and seeks blindly after what is new, it is a matter of great regret to me. I wish to set down in prints as much of the disappearing Japan as I can."
Perhaps this is why Karhu's Kyoto has such character. His buildings are all individuals. They are old, often venerable. The years and the seasons have given them a weathered patina that we associate with aging, not only of buildings but people. Perhaps that is why the artist has no use for people as such, and that his prints are almost entirely empty of them.
But at the same time these prints are full of references: a pair of geta left by a door, a line of umbrellas drying in the sun. This lends a certain pathos to the Karhu print. Things left by humans often seem more human-like than do the humans themselves. We think of the miles those geta, those umbrellas, have traveled. We think of the transience of human life.
And we remember that for a time the claims of man and the claims of nature hit a balance. As Karhu has written: "In Kyoto the vertical and horizontal lines of the tile roofs and the latticed windows strike a special harmony, like something alive. In my prints of Kyoto, I always strive to express this human warmth. Since wood accounts for much of Kyoto's beauty, it may also be the best way that beauty can be expressed -- through wood-block prints."
Mary and Norman Tolman, Karhu's dealers for 35 years, have made possible this handsome tribute, which includes 77 prints, one for each year of his life, but mostly taken from later works. These are those, they say, they best like and they are presented in nonchronological order. Also included is a chronology of the artist, a list of commissions and collections, and a paragraph of appreciation by the late James Michener, from a 1994 publication.
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