Few have heard of Shozaburo Watanabe (1885-1962). Even among those with an interest in Japanese art, he remains an obscure figure. This should not be cause for surprise as Watanabe was neither a painter, sculptor, novelist nor designer. In fact, he was not an artist at all: He was a publisher and businessman. And yet, by the 1920s, he had become one of the most influential figures in the artistic circles of his time.
Watanabe was no ordinary trader. In his late teens, he apprenticed with an art dealer and developed a passion for ukiyo-e. Alas, by the time he launched his own company in 1906, Japan’s glorious woodblock print tradition had lost much of its allure. Worse, the skills that supported it — the carving of blocks, the preparation and application of color pigments, the precise printing of images — were slowly disappearing. If nothing was done, Watanabe feared, this knowledge would soon be lost.
There was only one solution: to rejuvenate the tradition, and Watanabe spent his first decade in business trying to do just that. He established the Society for Ukiyo-e Research; he published high quality reproductions by Utagawa Hiroshige, Kitagawa Utamaro and other acknowledged masters; and he constantly searched for new collaborators and artisans who shared his vision. In time, he attracted a core group of superb artists such as Shinsui Ito, Hasui Kawase, Shunsen Natori and Kotondo Torii. With them, he launched the last significant woodblock print movement: shin-hanga, literally “new prints.”
Perhaps because they came last, the work of these artists has often been overshadowed by that of their illustrious ukiyo-e predecessors. Fortunately, a large and comprehensive show, “Shin Hanga: New Prints of Japan 1900-1960,” is currently touring Europe. It contains 220 works by 25 artists who formed the core of the movement. It thus provides a unique opportunity to reassess a pictorial heritage that remains underappreciated.
The first leg of the tour, which took place at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, wrapped up earlier this month, but the second opens today at Japan Museum SieboldHuis in Leiden, Netherlands. It will run until Sept. 11 before moving to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium, where it will remain until January 2023. For those unable to visit, a lavish and engaging catalog edited by Chris Uhlenbeck, the curator of the show and a long-time dealer in Japanese prints, was published by Ludion earlier this year. All images in the book will be on display in Brussels, but due to space constraints, only 125 are presented in Leiden.
Watanabe released his first original prints around 1907. While charming and quaint, they broke no new aesthetic ground. For instance, Hiroaki Takahashi, one of Watanabe’s first collaborators, was fond of dividing the background of his landscapes into planes of different shades to suggest depth. He also used unbroken, slanted lines to depict pouring rain. In an online interview with The Japan Times, Uhlenbeck points out that both are classic ukiyo-e devices “heavily inspired by Hiroshige.”
1916 was a watershed year. That summer, Watanabe released Shinsui Ito’s “Before the Mirror,” which is widely regarded as one of the first shin-hanga. In Japan, however, few noticed.
“The public was interested in different things,” Uhlenbeck explains. At the time, proponents of the avant-garde were taking their cues from Paris, then the capital of the art world. The woodcuts they admired, when they paid any attention to that medium, were those of the “creative print” movement, or sosaku hanga, which had been launched a decade earlier. “It was new, it was fresh, it was European, and it fit with the atmosphere of the times,” Uhlenbeck says.
Watanabe was little interested in that. What he wanted to do was preserve the ukiyo-e tradition and build on it, so he did what any savvy businessman would do, which was to search for a clientele that shared his interest. He found it in the expat community in Japan and relentlessly pursued its patronage. Before long, he was working with overseas Japanese dealers to expand abroad. By the end of the 1910s, Uhlenbeck explains, Watanabe was selling shin-hanga at American auctions.
At first glance, ukiyo-e and shin-hanga appear closely related. Aesthetic differences seem superficial and themes often overlap. But this is misleading and closer study reveals a vastly different reality. “Shin-hanga were luxury products,” Uhlenbeck says. “They were printed on paper that was heavier and of better quality, and it was more expensive. The number of superimposed printings also went up dramatically.” To illustrate this, he explains how a fine print by Hiroshige might have required 12 to 16 different color printings. For shin-hanga, however, 35 or 36 is not rare, while some of the woodcuts by Hiroshi Yoshida — who worked independently from Watanabe but pursued similar aims — required up to 60. “The technical prowess is just incredible,” Uhlenbeck adds.
Such a large number of impressions was partly made necessary by Watanabe’s fondness for natural dyes. He was no fan of Western synthetic pigments, which became ubiquitous after the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and account for the bright and at times garish colors prevalent in prints from the Meiji Era (1868-1912). The problem is that achieving similar depth with natural dyes, to say nothing of subtle nuances in tonalities, is impossible without a large number of impressions. Producing shin-hanga in the Watanabe mold was a labor-intensive undertaking.
This explains two other important differences between shin-hanga and ukiyo-e. The first is that a more strenuous production process inevitably led to smaller print runs — a few hundred copies on average and almost never more than 1,000. By comparison, in the early 19th century, it was not rare for an ukiyo-e to be released in at least 3,000 duplicates, sometimes far more. The other difference is the disappearance of multi-sheet prints, which were very popular until 1905. In the entire shin-hanga canon, we know of only one, a diptych by Natori. It was just too much work — and commercially too risky — to produce them.
Although Watanabe and his collaborators worked within a traditional structure, they were not completely oblivious to contemporary artistic trends. Goyo Hashiguchi, for example, often worked with live models, something that none of his Tokugawa peers would have thought of doing. Others, such as Shiro Kasamatsu or Koka Yamamura, experimented with self-carving and self-printing, two central tenets of the creative print movement. All shin-hanga artists also shared an acute awareness of the expressive power of color.
Watanabe was not the only publisher of shin-hanga. He was, however, the driving force behind the movement. He shaped its aesthetics and coined its name. Up to a third of the 3,000 shin-hanga ever produced were published by his company. By any measure, he was highly successful. But it was not always smooth sailing: He lost everything twice, first in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and then during the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II. He recovered from the first disaster, but not the second.
By then, Japan had changed and shin-hanga had run its course. “It became a method,” Uhlenbeck says, “which produced postcards rather than art.” Still, this does not diminish Watanabe’s achievement: For two glorious decades in the first half of the 20th century, he successfully imparted new life into an old tradition. His mantle is still up for grabs.
“Shin Hanga: New Prints of Japan 1900-1960” is currently touring Europe. It will be on display at Japan Museum SieboldHuis in Leiden, Netherlands, until Sept. 11 before moving to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium, until January 2023. For more information, visit sieboldhuis.org/en or artandhistory.museum/en.
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.