This is a lovely exhibition full of really lovely and enjoyable images. Often you have to work a bit in an art gallery, especially with modern art, but most of the images here are delightfully easy to process and enjoy. It’s like being in a high quality ice cream parlour and faced with an embarrassment of riches.
Kumoi Cherry Trees by Yoshida Hiroshi (1926) Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum
The show brings together artworks by three generations of just one extraordinary family, the Yoshida family from Japan who have each worked in the Japanese tradition of woodblock print art.
The father, Yoshida Hiroshi, was a leading creator of prints from the 1920s. He is represented by one room full of wonderful prints. His wife, Yoshida Fujio, was a renowned watercolourist, painter and printmaker in her own right, and is represented by six big lovely prints of flowers.
They had two sons who followed them into the family business, Tōshi and Hodaka, but who each followed different artistic paths and engaged with American art of the 1950s and 1960s in different ways with different results.
Hodaka’s wife, Yoshida Chizuko, was also an artist, co-founder of the first group of female printmakers in Japan, and is represented by works in her own right.
The fifth and final room is entirely filled by an installation by Hodaka and Chizuko’s daughter, Yoshida Ayomi, the third generation of this remarkable dynasty of artists, whose installation is closely modelled on one of the classic prints by her grandfather, which we saw in the first room.
The patriarch: Yoshida Hiroshi (1876 to 1950)
The first room is devoted to the life and career of Yoshida Hiroshi, one of Japan’s greatest artists. In his early career he was successful as a Western-style painter. It was only at the age of 44 that he began designing woodblock prints.
He became a leading figure in the shin hanga movement which aimed to revive traditional ukiyo-e print subjects by combining them with Western principles, techniques and aesthetic choices, resulting in a unique fusion of styles. The movement was characterised by its emphasis on naturalistic and realistic depictions, in particular in the genre of landscapes.
Hiroshi was remarkably cosmopolitan and travelled the world in the 1920s and 30s. It was his trip across America which inspired some wonderful depictions of dramatic landscape such as mountains, the Grand Canyon and so on.
El Capitan by Yoshida Hiroshi (1925) Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum
He not only travelled the Western world but exhibited and sold his woodblock prints, gaining an international reputation in the US and Europe.
In fact there turns out to be an amazing fact which is that Hiroshi visited Dulwich Picture Gallery, way back in 1900, when he was just 23, and the room of his works displays his signature in the Gallery’s visitor book. More than a coincidence, I wonder whether it’s been a long-running ambition of the gallery to bring together works by the great man.
Hiroshi worked by creating clear black outlines of the subject and then filling them in with washes of paint. In the small side room (the Mausoleum) off to one side of the series of rooms at Dulwich, they’re showing a short film featuring interviews with Japanese craftsmen who explain the incredible care Hiroshi took with his prints. He overlaid multiple blocks of the identical same subject, sometimes as many as 20 (!), each one designed to bring out a different aspect of the design or to print different colours over each other. This helps explain the tremendous sense of depth and resonance they have, an amazing subtlety of coloration which disappears in online reproductions.
Installation view of ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing the video ‘Hiroshi Yoshida and his woodblock prints’ and the display case of wood print tools (photo by the author)
It also explains why he made many prints in pairs designed to convey different times of day, such as the morning and evening prints of the Acropolis in Athens (1925) or the Taj Mahal in India (1932), the Matterhorn in Switzerland (1925) or the Sphinx in Egypt (1925). The images of the Taj Mahal used fourteen blocks (!) and 55 impressions to create the desired gradation of colour or bokashi.
This video (nothing to do with the gallery) gives you a sense of the graphic accuracy, the use of distinct black outlines, but the tremendous subtlety of colour in his works.
The patriarch’s wife: Yoshida Fujio (1887 to 1987)
Yoshida Fujio was a renowned watercolourist, painter and printmaker but this is the first time any of her work has been exhibited in the UK. Fujio was married to Hiroshi and travelled with him across the USA and Europe, exhibiting her delicate watercolours of Japan to acclaim. Upon returning home in 1907, she took part in the first exhibition organised by the Japanese Academy of Arts. In 1918 she set co-founded the Shuyokai or Vermilion Leaf Society, the first association of female Japanese artists.
It was with the death of her husband, in 1950, that Fujio, inspired by the experiments of her sons with abstraction, returned to artistic practice after a 30-year gap and created an iconic series of woodblocks in flowers in the early 1950s. Six big examples are on display here. In their hyper close-up transformation of vibrant colours into semi-abstract designs, they are pretty much the opposite of her husband’s long shots of realistically captured landscapes. Apparently, she achieved the distinctive optical effects by placing the flowerheads in a fishbowl.
Yellow Iris by Yoshida Fujio (1954) Private Collection. Photograph by Mareo Suemasa
The eldest son: Yoshida Tōshi (1911 to 1995)
The eldest son, Tōshi, started off in his father’s footsteps, depicting landscapes and cityscapes with fine examples on display here. But when his father died, in 1950, he became head not only of the family but the family business, the Yoshida Studio, and began experimenting with abstract art. The result is landscapes which achieve an abstract monumental quality.
Unknown (Michi no) by Yoshida Toshi (1968) Private Collection. Photograph by Mareo Suemasa
He was responsible for maybe my favourite piece in the show, a 1964 abstract titled Abstruse. As usual an online reproduction can’t convey the shimmering and entrancing effect of the multiple layers of colour. I kept having to go back to look at it again and each time got drawn deeper and deeper.
The younger son: Yoshida Hodaka (1926 to 1995)
In a break from his family’s established style the younger son, Yoshida Hodaka, expanded upon traditional printmaking to incorporate collage and photoetching. Like his father and brother, foreign travels influenced his choice of motifs, but he was also inspired by Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstraction. Here’s a characteristic work from the 1950s where you can immediately see the influence of Western abstraction, and the curators point out the influence of Juan Miro and Paul Klee.
Profile of an Ancient Warrior by Yoshida Hodaka (1958) Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum
In the 1960s there’s a little explosion of Pop Art with images from magazines (often of 1960s glamour models wearing bikinis) in collages and assemblies. By the 1980s he’s morphed again to create collages combining realistic images of buildings and streets, rather American-looking, with figures of people or animals pasted in front.
The son’s wife: Yoshida Chizuko (1924 to 2017)
Hodaka married Yoshida Chizuko, herself a noted artist and co-founder of the first group of female printmakers in Japan, the Women’s Print Association. Chizuko often depicted landscapes, nature, and traditional Japanese scenes but she, also, explored aspects of abstraction and repetition. Her works combine Abstract Expressionism and traditional Japanese printmaking.
Tenryuji Garden by Yoshida Chizuko (1953) Private Collection. Photograph by Mareo Suemasa
Some of her works reminded me of the covers of 1950s jazz albums I own, so I wasn’t surprised to see one of them is actually titled Jazz (1954). One of my favourite works in the whole show was the one titled Rain (1953) because it’s so evocative of that era and its design.
The grand-daughter: Yoshida Ayomi (born 1958)
The youngest member of the Yoshida printmaking family is Yoshida Ayomi, Hodaka and Chizuko’s daughter. Her practice combines traditional Japanese printmaking techniques with modern elements, often utilising organic materials.
The final room in the exhibition hosts a site-specific installation created especially for the exhibition. It is titled ‘Transient beauty’ and completely covers three walls of the final room. On the right-hand wall the outline of the cherry trees exactly match the trees seen in the Yoshida Hiroshi print in the first room, ‘Kumoi Cherry Trees’ (1926). Just about 100 years later his granddaughter has lightly drawn the outline onto grey canvas and then stuck onto it hundreds and hundreds tiny pink petals made from fabric. These stray across onto the middle wall which has a completely different vibe. Rather than one complete piece of cloth as the grey wall is, the middle one is a set of 30 or so square wooden panels, and instead of being lightly painted onto it, as per the grey wall, here the outlines have been strongly graved into the wood, maybe a reference to the wood carving tradition of her family.
Installation view of ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing two of the three walls which make up ‘Transient beauty’ by Yoshida Ayomi (2024) (photo by the author)
The left-hand wall was my favourite, although I only have this bad photo I took of it. I think I liked it because there was more going on: at the top the black silhouette of winter branches was, for me, far more evocative than the sketchy outlines of the trees on the right. I think most of the space is intended to convey a rainy sky with variegated stormclouds, but I read it as the surface of a pond or lake with shadows and light playing across it and dappled by a million tiny splashes of stormy raindrops. There was more to look at and enjoy in this wall-sized image than the other two.
Installation view of ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing part of the middle and most of the left-hand wall of ‘Transient beauty’ by Yoshida Ayomi (2024) (photo by the author)
Video
DPG have released a video showing the speeded-up creation of the installation.
Thoughts
What an amazing family! What an imaginative world their works create and what a journey you go on as you walk through them. The majority of works by Yoshida Hiroshi are on loan from the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan and are travelling to the UK for the first and maybe only time. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Treat yourself.
Related links
- Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 3 November 2024
Books & Boots 