The Hawke's Bay Museum's Trust collection includes a range of works by Japanese artists from the early 20th century.
The Hawke's Bay Museum's Trust collection includes a range of works by Japanese artists from the early 20th century.
Works such as this view of Kameido Tenjin Shrine by artist Hiroshi Yoshida is but one of a delightful range of works by Japanese artists from the early 20th century in the Hawke's Bay Museums Trust collection.
The trust's print collection is one of the best and most substantial in Aotearoa.
Built 300 years ago to commemorate 9th century poet Sugawara no Michizane, the shrine is located in Tokyo's river district Koto and visited by thousands of people every year when the wisteria vines flower in spring.
While flowering wisteria is something you will admire at this time of year in Hawke's Bay, here, with the sheer mass of violet draping through trellises in the Kameido Shrine, it seems even more sublime.
These gorgeous blooms and delightful drum bridge (said to slow those walking across it into a more focused state of mind) have been the subject of many artworks made by artists over the centuries, including by Hokusai's contemporary, master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige.
However, perhaps the most well-known of all these beautiful works is this one by Yoshida, who was born in 1876 in Fukuoka Prefecture, southwest of where the shrine is located.
Kameido Bridge, 1927, by Hiroshi Yoshida, from the collection of Hawke's Bay Museums Trust, Ruawharo Tā-ū-rangi.
Like Hiroshige, Yoshida was a master printmaker and perhaps due in part to the international experience he gained as a young man he became a significant innovator in the customary practices of Japanese woodblock printing.
In his early years, Yoshida exhibited in the United States of America and Europe where he was exposed to a range of ways of working.
In his later years, Yoshida developed an expansive approach, innovating printmaking practice by combining the traditional collaborative production approach of Ukiyo-e prints with the more modern Sōsaku-hanga principle of artist as sole creator.
Establishing his own studio, Yoshida hired professional carvers and printers who he closely supervised to produce designs. Remembered for encouraging young artists to follow their instincts, Yoshida inspired his mentees to be true to their own sense of direction.
His own work is notable for combining traditional Japanese printmaking techniques with non-traditional subjects such as the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon.
The son of an art teacher, Yoshida studied under an art lecturer who was noted for teaching Western style painting, an educational approach not uncommon in the second half of the 19th century when many Japanese painters were influenced by Western painting styles.
As much as Western painting was an influence on Japanese art, Japanese printmaking was a major transformational influence on Western painting in the late 1800s.
Artists such as Monet, Van Gogh and Manet embraced Japanese ideas, such as their use of line and flat colour. It gave Manet and the Impressionists the freedom to produce works that evoked a poetic representation rather than photorealistic reality with linear perspective, which was up until then, crucial in Western arts.
More relatable perhaps, is the visual connection the art form has to the tradition of graphic novel illustration.
Ever popular Japanese comic books and cartoons such as manga or anime inherit a picture making tradition based on line work and areas of flat colour much like that used in woodblock prints such as Yoshida's.
Graphic novels of today are a modern day example of the continued exchange between Japan and the West where each continue to develop with the influence of the other.
Yoshida lived between 1876 and 1950. After his death, his family produced prints using the woodblocks that he had created. These prints are identifiable by the pencil signature and English titles seen in this work Kameido Bridge.
The trust owns 16 of these wonderful prints by Yoshida all of which you can enjoy on the museum's website. These along with works by others such as Tsukioka Kōgyo, form the basis of our beautiful and varied collection of Japanese prints many of which were gifted to the trust by Mr W. E. Anderson.
Mr Anderson had originally loaned the museum the works for an exhibition in 1957, gifting them after he died.
These along with works by others such as Tsukioka Kōgyo form the basis of a beautiful and varied collection of works made by Japanese artists in the first half of the 20th century.
