Unknown Masters in Wood

Just as U.S. servicemen and college students tack pictures of Raquel Welch or travel posters on their walls, so merchants and tradesmen in 18th and 19th century Japan delighted in cheap, mass-produced wood-block prints, or hanga. These genre pictures showed well-known actors or courtesans of the day, picturesque views of Mount Fuji and picaresque travel scenes. They were known as ukiyo-e, literally "pictures of the floating world," because to devout Buddhists everyday existence was a transient stage in man's journey to nirvana. Yet the lasting charm and skill with which the Japanese craftsmen imbued their images have influenced Western artists from Constable onward.

Currently, Los Angeles' U.C.L.A. art gallery is displaying 163 Japanese ukiyo-e hanga, perhaps one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever. Its genesis was the acquisition by U.C.L.A.'s Grunwald Arts Foundation of some 650 prints from the estate of Frank Lloyd Wright. With this as a nucleus, U.C.L.A. commissioned Orientalist Harold P. Stern, assistant director of Washington's Freer Gallery of Art, to assemble a comprehensive survey of Japanese master prints and to write an accompanying book.

Simple but Soul. Wright was one of the floating world's most fervent admirers. He first saw prints at the home of another architect in the 1880s while still an apprentice, eventually amassed 5,000 prints. They were the only decorative art-- aside from his own ornamentation-- that he proposed for his buildings; even his architectural renderings have an Oriental look. The ukiyo-e "intrigued me and taught me much," he once said. "A Japanese may tell you what he knows in a single drawing, but never will he attempt to tell you all he knows. He is content to lay stress upon a simple element, insignificant enough perhaps, until he has handled it; then the slight means employed touch the soul of the subject so surely that while less would have failed of the intended effect, more would have been profane. The gospel of the elimination of the insignificant preached by the print came home to me in architecture."

Japanese printmakers eliminated the insignificant partly as a matter of economic necessity. The making of a hanga was a laborious process. First, the artist brushed his design onto mulberry paper. Then the drawing was glued to a cherry-wood block. Next, two engravers incised the design upon the block. Several black-and-white prints were made from it, and these were then glued to other blocks that were incised in turn so that each could be used to print a single color. In the early 18th century, print-makers were largely limited to various vegetable-based inks of red and yellow. By the 1740s, greens, blues and grays had been added to the spectrum. The artist Suzuki Harunobu is credited with developing the first nishiki-e, or full-color picture--named for nishiki-e, a richly embroidered brocade.

Voluptuous and Fragile. Since the artist was only one of a number of craftsmen employed by the wood-block publisher, virtually nothing is known about even the finest draftsmen--just as few people know the names of the artists who worked for Currier and Ives. No scholar is really certain where Harunobu was born, though he is famed as the "master of the delicate brush." His genteel young ladies have a fragile, almost porcelain appeal--as can be seen from one graceful nishiki-e that shows a girl holding up a lantern to admire plum blossoms on a warm, dark night.

More to the popular taste was the robust Kitagawa Utamaro, who liked to draw the voluptuous courtesans who inhabited the red-light Yoshiwara district of old Tokyo (then called Edo). One series of Utamaro prints commemorated the erotic specialties of various sporting houses; the house called Onitsutaya was evidently celebrated for its tattooing, since one of its courtesans was shown jabbing a needle into the arm of her wincing lover, like a ranch owner putting his brand on a calf.

Furuyama Moromasa was one of the first artists to explore Western-style perspective in what were known as uki-e. In one print, he employed it to present a Yoshiwara scene of two gentlemen, one playing a game of hand sumo, the other listening to a courtesan playing the samisen, in a scene of restrained eroticism that did for an 18th century Japanese customer what Playboy does for his 20th century counterpart.

Vanishing Margin. Landscape painting became popular in the 19th century, and Japan's two most renowned masters of ukiyo-e were essentially landscapists: Katsushika Hokusai and Ando Hiroshige. A limpid calm pervades Hiroshige's prints, as in his view of boatmen poling along the Kiso River. The pictures of Hokusai, on the other hand, are explosive and dynamic. One scene nominally illustrating a wistful poem by Hitomaro about loneliness is dominated by the smoke from a fisherman's fire, which roils upward with an anything but wistful force. Nevertheless, as Wright observed, "both were native sons, preserving a record of a vanishing world which they loved and understood, and which by the narrow margin of their work alone has appeared before us to teach us our own way forward."

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