Yozo Hamaguchi ~ The Modern Mezzotint ~ at Boca Raton Museum of Art

Friday, 01 December 2006 09:27

Boca Raton, FL - The Boca Raton Museum of Art is pleased to announce the opening of Yozo Hamaguchi: Father of the Modern Mezzotint on December 6, 2006.  Yozo Hamaguchi will be on display through February 18, 2007.  The internationally celebrated work of printmaker Yozo Hamaguchi (Japan/France 1909-2000), arguably the greatest mezzotint artist of the 20th century, captures the classic, timeless beauty of familiar objects – cherries, lemons, ladybugs and butterflies – in the total silence of moonlit space. 

In 1930, after sculpture studies in Tokyo, Hamaguchi moved to Paris to study painting and drawing, but became fascinated with the complex and time-consuming printmaking technique of mezzotint engraving. 

The mezzotint process, developed in the 17th century, is a copper-plate engraving process that can show tonal shading - "mezzo" or half-tints between black and white, as well as the subtle gradation of colors.  The process is unforgiving of error or impatience, but allows unsurpassed delicacy of line, color shading and velvety texture. Through his development of the color mezzotint, Hamaguchi found the perfect balance between the Zen-like simplicity of his subject matter and the laborious complexity of technique in harmonious compositions which reflect an artist’s concern for color, balance, subtlety and refinement, and a poet’s sensitivity to illusory perfection, spiritual meditation and the evocation of mystery.

YOZO HAMAGUCHI: FATHER OF THE MODERN MEZZOTINT

The Artist: Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000) was a post-war printmaker whose imagery was tangentially influenced by the Surrealists. Because mezzotint was the only medium used, he was considered by many to be the “Master of the Mezzotint.”  His achievements in this difficult intaglio process have earned him many awards in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Lugano, and the Grand Prix from Lubljana International Print Biennale and the Grand Prize from the Northern California Print Competition.  He is represented in the collections of prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Japan and the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, France, as well as in numerous distinguished international collections.

In 1930, after studying sculpture at the School of Art in Tokyo, he moved to Paris and took up studies in painting and drawing, both on his own and at the Academy Grand Chaumiere.  He brought the ascetic qualities of his Japanese heritage to the mezzotint technique and achieved an extraordinary balance between simplicity of subject matter and complexity of technique.  At the same time, he inspired a new interest in the medium and developed the colored mezzotint.  Prior to Hamaguchi’s interest in this way of making prints, the mezzotint was used in the 18th century to reproduce paintings.  It was too laborious a process to have much attraction for the creative artist and was rarely used since, or for purely inventive work.

The Process: The mezzotint process gives effects of tone in mass.  The copper plate is uniformly roughened or scored with a roulette or rocker so that it would print when inked and intense uniform velvety black.  The design is then worked out by polishing the plate to a shiny hard surface that will not retain ink for the highlights, which are to remain, the white of the paper.  The area’s intermediate tones are polished down (burnished) also according to their value, between the black of the plate and the polished surface of the highlight, so that all intermediate tones are obtained by removing more or less of the roughened copper surface of the plate with a scraper or burnisher. Printing is done in a press under great pressure.  The intaglio process can be adapted to color printing by using a number of plates, carefully keyed to print exactly one over another, each one taking care of the portions of the design in a given color.

The Result: Just as Morandi discovered beauty in simple objects, so Hamaguchi strips simple objects of the ordinariness, takes them out of their normal surroundings, isolates them and raises them into the realm of dreams and poetry.  The objects in his pictures seem to rise out of the dark night, out of the surrounding velvety blackness. For both Morandi and Hamaguchi, simple objects are symbols of permanence and changelessness.  There is nothing to show the time of day or the season of the year.  They exist outside of time, as if the artist, who had instilled life into them, had also lost his sense of time.

Hamaguchi’s harmonious compositions reflect his concern for color, balance, and refinement, and subtle gradations, seeming as if landscape within landscape.  He makes use of white, or rather light, in his drawings so that there is reflected on his subject a faint and misty moonlight.  Black constitutes the solid, permanent background, being a creative factor depicting his mysterious vision of poetic meditation.

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