Chazen Museum of Art Exhibits 'Color Woodcut International'

Monday, 27 November 2006 20:08

Madison, WI - The Chazen’s fine collection of color woodcut prints will form the basis of a major exhibition tracing the interwoven influences among Japanese, British, and American artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.  This exhibition, opening December 9 in Brittingham Galleries VI & VII through February 25, 2007, will explore the remarkable similarities between the three countries’ color woodcuts, constituting a short-lived, but lively international style.

Color woodcut printmaking was not new to Britain or America when Japanese prints caught the European and American imagination in the nineteenth century.  The fresh colors, the simplicity of the materials, and the departure from traditional compositions entranced western artists as well as the rest of the public.  In France, this enthusiasm for all things Japanese was called Japonisme, and it influenced artists such as Toulouse Lautrec and Henri Rivière.  Likewise, Japanese audiences and artists were intrigued by the possibilities of western art, which was broadly available by the end of the nineteenth century.  Artists such as Hiroshige II created images of the strange foreigners and imagined what American cities looked like.

However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, artists were not content to merely imagine what the other side of the world looked like.  As a result, a growing number of artists traveled back and forth between the continents, seeing, learning from and teaching each other.  From America, Arthur Wesley Dow and Bertha Lum traveled to Japan to learn the techniques of color woodblock printmaking, while from Japan, Hiroshi Yoshida, Mokuchu Urushibara, and Ohara Shoson traveled to the West in search of imagery and patronage. 

As the artists traveled, the tricks and techniques of color woodblock printmaking became widespread, as did appreciation for the prints.  At the same time that woodblock printmakers in the West started to write about their processes, Japanese publishers such as Watanabe begin to seriously seek out the print market outside of Japan.  Some important themes began to emerge.  In the area of landscape, scenes of nature and old-fashioned architecture outnumbered modern city views, and images of animals were nearly as popular as those of human figures.  Works during this period were often idyllic images, whose beauty attracted an international audience.  Some artists in the West such as the English printmaker John Platt and the American printmaker Luigi Rist embraced Japanese technique but also brought in their own style.

The exhibition will show the colorful process of the prints becoming first more similar, as an international group of artists learned from and competed with each other, then show how the similarities dissolved as artists of each country went their separate ways.  A full-color catalogue of the exhibition will also be on sale in the Museum Gift Shop.

The Chazen Museum of Art is open Tuesdays-Fridays 9 am-5 pm; Saturdays and Sundays 11 am-5 pm; closed Mondays and major holidays.  Admission to galleries and educational events is free.  The museum is located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  Information is also available by visiting our web site at www.chazen.wisc.edu