H. N. Werkman

Alston W. Purvis's volume in Yale's Monographics series brought this interesting Dutch printmaker to my attention. Hendrik Werkman was born in Leens in the Netherlands in 1882 and lived most of his life in the city of Groningen. A professional printer, he apparently didn't have much of a head for business, but he did have a rich talent for design and typographical experimentation. Though he became associated with a Dutch art circle called De Ploeg (The Plough), he retained a prickly independence, and his work was not widely distributed or recognized during his lifetime. One of his best-known projects was a kind of chapbook periodical entitled The Next Call, much of which (there were nine installments, some printed on a single folded sheet) is reproduced in Purvis's book. He was particularly adept at using found materials and printing furniture as elements in his work; in the image immediatly below, for example, the black element was printed using the key plate from a door.

Prolific and resourceful even in the face of difficult circumstances, he created a series of some 600 monoprints that he called "druksels," a name derived from the Dutch drukken (to print), for calendars, bookplates, and other ephemera, and for a suite of prints illustrating stories from Martin Buber's Chassidische legenden (published as Tales of the Hasidim in English). Though Werkman was not Jewish, these last, published under German occupation in 1942, may have contributed to his arrest and execution in March 1945, just days before the Allied liberation of Grondingen. A substantial portion of his work, which had been seized by the Nazis at the time of his arrest, was destroyed during the fighting for the city. Fortunately, much of it remains.

Purvis's H. N. Werkman seems to be the best current source on the artist's life and work. There is a substantial online collection at the Groningen Museum and a nice selection at www.druksel.com.

More Katazome

According to the label, these katazome (stencil-dyed) calendar pages were "made by Haruo Kuriyama in Kyoto" and distributed by Yasutomo Co. in San Francisco. The artist who designed them, however, is almost certainly Takeshi Nishijima. The page for February is missing from this set.

Click on the katazome label below for earlier related posts.

Katazome calendar: Takeshi Nishijima

This folio of stenciled prints is the work of a katazome artist who designed a number of calendars that were produced from 1969 or 1970 to 1980 (and perhaps outside that range of years as well). If he is the same Takeshi Nishijima listed on Artfacts.Net then he was born in 1929 and died in 2003.

According to the descriptive text that accompanies the folio, Nishijima was both a professor of art at Kyoto University and "a graphic and textile designer [who] exhibited in numerous one man shows and won the coveted Grand Prize at the Kyoto Art Exhibit." He was associated with Haruo Kuriyama of the Wazome Kogei company, which was probably the publisher of this calendar. I've been told that Kuriyama was a friend of Keisuke Serizawa, the best known katazome artist, who produced calendars annually beginning in 1946.

Given the similarity in technique and layout between the work of the two calendar makers, Nishijima may well have studied with Serizawa; if so, he was also effectively a competitor, as Serizawa's calendars continued to appear through the 1970s. His work isn't as intricate as Serizawa's, which shows a greater fondness for rich geometrical ornament, and it appears to have received little attention outside of Japan. These calendars were, nevertheless, clearly aimed at Western audiences, as all the names of the months are in English.

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the printmaker Brian Garner for providing these images. I have cropped them square for the web, but they were printed on handmade paper and the bottom edges are in fact untrimmed. Below each image I have added the interpretive text for each month that was provided by the publisher on a separate sheet (see the last image below).


"During January people come to pray at Heian Shrine, Kyoto, for peace and good luck throughout the year."


"February brings tranquility in Plum Tree Park at Tsukigase, Kyoto."


"March is the time when water orchids rise to impart a springlike charm and grace."


"In April the tree peony is a delightful harbinger of the joys of spring."


"The rose which blooms in May is the universal symbol of love."


"June tells of farm dwellings at the castle town, near Nara prefecture."


"As summer progresses into July we are present as a storm passes, with clouds running at the ridge."


"The first yield of fruit in August tends to refresh the eye as well as the palate."


"September is the month for typhoons. Here willow trees sway in the wind at Nijo Castle, Kyoto, to protest the approaching violence."


"October's autumn flowers are handsomely framed by a Chinese jar of the Sung era."


"The sunset symbolizes approach of the year's end. The landscape of Japanese inland sea Seto is November's setting."


"As December arrives we note that Kyoto's farmers have completed their work. The harvest is in and we see a serene community of farmhouses."


Here are some katazome links:

• Explanations of the technique at Wikipedia and by John Marshall.
  
  
• George Baxley has information on Keisuke Serizawa's calendars, with numerous examples.
  
  
• Kit Eastman is an American illustrator who employs the katazome technique.
  
  
• Another artist, M. Joan Lintault, has several interesting posts on her work with the technique.
  
  
• The Japan Society has organized an outstanding exhibition dedicated to Keisuke Serizawa, which runs through January 17, 2010. A catalog is available from Yale University Press.
  
  
• And finally, my earlier posts, with illustrations of a full calendar set possibly by Serizawa, another set that is probably by Takeshi Nishijima, and a review of the Japan Society show.

A Girl's Diary (1898)

This hardbound German-language "Golden Jubilee Calendar" was issued in New York in 1898. An item in Publisher's Weekly (December 4, 1897) announced its publication:

Lemcke & Buechner in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the firm of B. Westermann & Co., to which they have succeeded, have issued in book form "Meyer's Historisch-Geographischer Kalender" for 1898. This calendar, which contains useful historical and geographical information, was formerly issued in the shape of a pad, and so had only ephemeral value. In book form it will no doubt be acceptable to a wider circle than heretofore.

Each day of the year is decorated with an engraving or other illustration, mostly of points of interest although there are vignettes of such worthies as Martin Luther and Walter Scott as well. The calendar's pages are extremely brittle and the binding is in a ruinous state, though enough of it remains intact to make it difficult to get undistorted scans of a few sample pages:





The versos and endpapers of this copy were used as a diary and scrapbook by an American girl in her teens who lived in New York City. She was not from a German-speaking family but was apparently learning German from a governess, as the entries occasionally mention someone referred to only as "Fräulein." I've been able to identify the diarist, who belonged to a fairly well-to-do Manhattan family with military and political connections. Though her diary has no great literary merit, it preserves interesting glimpses of her daily round of social and educational activities, including visits to West Point, Warwick (New York), and other locations.

Monday Dec 27 I packed my trunk and Tuesday I went to West Point & Mama and Papa went to Washington. I took an early train, arrived at twelve and found Bus (?) waiting for me. After lunch she & I went to see the yearlings drill. Capt. Parker had hurt himself the day before and another man drilled them. Later we met the Jackson kids Maud & Evelyn and we had a short talk with their brother. Wed. afternoon we had a tea at the Parkers & I met about 35 - 40 cadets....

On several pages she sketches and describes the designs of dresses she was making by hand:



Though the handwriting in the above pages is sometimes difficult to make out, it is often far worse elsewhere in the diary. Confined as she was to a single page per day, when she had a particularly busy day she simply wrote smaller. On a couple of occasions she filled the page, rotated the book 90 degrees, and wrote over what she had already written. It was as if she despaired of leaving anything out, as if she realized all too well that in time her words would be all that remained.

The young diarist later married, had children, and eventually died at an advanced age. I have no way of knowing whether she ever kept a diary again.

More Katazome Calendar Images

After closer inspection of the cache of loose calendar pages I referred to in my earlier post on this topic, I've decided that the katazome pages below probably belong to a single ensemble. They are apparently not by Keisuke Serizawa, the most prominent katazome calendar maker, who seems to have issued a different calendar in 1969. They could be by the less well-known artist named Takeshi Nishijima, who produced several calendars in the 1970s -- or they could be by another hand entirely.

To my eye, these are not quite up to the artistic level of the images in the 1959 set I posted (which George Baxley says is "reportedly" the work of Serizawa). They're a little flatter, with less subtlety and detail, but they're handsome nonetheless. My favorite is the August image, because I'm just a sucker for fish. But the July scene baffles me; just what is it exactly?