Rain

These images by the printmaker Kawase Hasui (1883 – 1957) are from the extensive online galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.








In Modern Japanese Prints 1912-1989, Lawrence Smith writes of Kawase:

During his career he produced over 600 landscape prints, including seventeen series, covering most areas of Japan, which he constantly travelled. After a period of eclipse following his death, he has now become recognized as Japan's best print landscapist since Hiroshige.

Along the bay

She is, he thinks, as beautiful a girl as he has ever seen. She is studying the cello and he -- without great conviction -- environmental science, but even before they become friends he spies her one day making her way across campus, in subdued but easy conversation with a friend, her long hair loose and falling midway down her back. At first she reminds him, he thinks, of a painting he remembers seeing somewhere, a Rossetti or something like that, but when he gets a closer look he sees that he is mistaken. There is nothing remote or iconic about her face; her features are delicate, her expression open and unaffected. Eventually they meet and become friends but nothing more. He has a steady girlfriend through most of his junior and senior years and she, he believes, has a boyfriend who goes to some other school.

After college they lose touch, but by chance a year later they each spend the summer months in a resort town on the coast. When he runs into her unexpectedly, just as the tourist season is starting to hit, he is waiting on tables in a seafood place on the docks and renting a room by himself in a rickety backstreet walkup, his future plans unknown. She is living by herself in a tiny cottage on the bluffs outside of town, rehearsing for a festival with a local chamber orchestra and preparing to begin her MFA. He calls her up and stops by for dinner one evening and with what seems to him almost miraculously mutual avidity they wind up in bed together. Within a week he has moved in, carrying the few essential possessions he hasn't stowed at his mother's house or his father's place back home: a backpack with an aluminum frame, a sleeping bag, a sackful of CDs, and an outback hat.

On warm evenings, while she waits for him, she moves a chair onto the porch and plays to the distant bay, watching the shadows of the walnut tree that overhangs the building quiver and drift across the floor planks. Then he comes home with fish and chips and a bottle of wine purloined from the kitchen; he is tired but his eyes brighten when he sees her face. She lights a pair of candles and sets them on a table by the picture window. While they eat he tells her stories of his day to make her laugh, and before long they are once again entwined.

Late at night, when the embers of their desire are at last consumed, he likes to lie back in the dark with his eyes open and imagine his future with her, and she curls silently beside him and thinks about how to tell him that he has none.

Angles

In a burst of blue flame the burner catches. She sets the kettle on the stove, yawns, and takes a glass from the drainer, fills it and slowly slakes her thirst. Her lover still sleeps in the bedroom, the shades down, the clock's red digits shifting like the even, unhurried pulse of some silent, cold creature in the deepest part of the sea.

She takes a photograph down from her shelf. Within a gilt and weathered frame a woman she has never met, wearing a stiff grey dress, is standing on a boathouse porch. She is smiling compliantly but her gaze is just perceptibly askew of the camera's lens, and the fingers of her left hand are tense and splayed out from the railing she leans on.

Five stories down the last cars of a subway train rattle up to the platform. The doors open; a man peers out to see the name of the station, takes a step forward, then hesitates and retreats. New passengers fill the car, the stragglers shifting their bags and arching their backs to edge into the narrow spaces that are still unoccupied. At the far end of the car a cell phone chimes as the train lurches into motion.

The man squeezes forward to get off at the next station. In his hand, neatly folded, he holds a Chinese newspaper. His thumb partially obscures the photograph of a beaming figure in a business suit and hard hat. In the background, behind him, are the girders of a skyscraper under construction. As the rider steps from the train he drops the paper into the first bin he passes.

At street level an elderly couple are silently ambling uptown. The man, who strolls a step ahead of the woman, has a full beard and long grey hair, both streaked with day-glo dye. He is wearing a long dress, and a pigeon is resting comfortably atop his head. He smiles beatifically and nods to pedestrians as they go by.

Two teenaged girls from Germany stop in front of the man and ask, in barely accented English, if they can take his picture. The man agrees and poses happily, first with one girl and then the other, then acknowledges their thank yous and continues on. The woman behind him never once looks up.

One of the girls is wearing a thin oatmeal scarf. She stands still for a moment, wrapping its loose ends around her neck and tucking them into her jacket, until her companion touches her arm and says something in German. They pause for a moment, talking, then stride up to the nearest crosswalk. There is no traffic and they cross against the light. Once on the far sidewalk they turn to the left and move quickly away.

Two stories above, a woman in an office is eating a danish and holding the receiver of her telephone to her head as she types. The phone is ringing but no one picks up. On her wall there is a framed black-and-white photograph sent to her by a friend in Brazil. In the photo a little girl in a spotless white dress stands in the middle of an empty plaza. There is no expression on her face; her eyes, ever so slightly raised, are intently watching something off to the left of the picture, just out of sight.

Three miles north the phone rings in a narrow apartment with a view of the river over sycamores and playgrounds. Bookshelves cover every wall, and piles of foxed and jacketless books are stacked on the floor in every room except the loo. There is a broad desk, with a glass top, in front of the window, and on it, nestled between the phone and a stack of manila folders, an answering machine blinks, but the ringing dies away before it picks up.

A few blocks away, along one of the gray spines that twist from uptown to down, a man watches the traffic signals change from red to green and back again. As he sits by himself, nursing lukewarm coffee at a sidewalk table under an awning in the rain, he wonders if he inhabits the city that appears before him or one that he has imagined, though in the end he decides that it is both.

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?

The Goblin Snob

I don't really know what to make of this rather odd book, which was published in 1855 or thereabouts and which is, like its creator Henry Louis Stephens, now solidly obscure. I have reproduced below the opening pages plus a handful of engravings from the early part of the book. Click through the images for a clearer view.








The text of the poem alternates with the artwork, and the whole thing runs to 96 pages. The poem's hero is a boy who seems to be made of rubber, which is why he is called "Coo-chook" (from "caoutchouc," a now disused term that must be one of the very few Tupi-derived words in English).






The Mephistophelian fellow springing up from the coal-hole is the Goblin Snob himself, who turns up to provoke mayhem at various points in the boy's career.










In the end poor Coo-chook is given up for dead but revives, while the Goblin Snob becomes a Peer of the Realm. The whole thing is probably satirical, though satirical of exactly what no longer seems clear. I'm afraid these scans leave a bit to be desired but I hope they give a least a sense of Stephens's curious comic artistry.

Bud Bloom Poetry and 50 Watts have illustrations and text of another Stephens work, Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin.

Update (August 2020): A tattered copy of the book has turned up on eBay including the pictorial cover below, which my copy lacks and which I've not seen before.

Chicago: A History in Block-Print

These linoleum-block prints were created by a group of design students under the direction of Clara MacGowan, assistant professor of art at Northwestern University. They were published in 1934 in an oversized paperbound portfolio, accompanied by captions by James Alton James, a professor of American history at the same institution.

The prints were presented in chronological order, beginning with Marquette and Joliet in 1673 and concluding with several images of the Century of Progress exposition of 1933. Some of the earlier images may now seem a bit trite (log cabins, Indians attacking a woman with a hatchet, and so on), and the level of command of the medium among the various students varies, but many of the architectural scenes are quite vigorous and appealing. In the selection below I have included the subject of each print and the name of the artist responsible, but have omitted the historical captions.


University Hall, Northwestern University (Josephine McCarty)


The Tribune Tower (Louise Ebeling Dean)


The University of Chicago Chapel (C. Dean Chipman)


The Daily News Building (Alice Rose Dedouch)


The Chicago Civic Opera House (Dorothy Aires Westerdahl)


The Deering Library, Northwestern University (Hannah Jewett)
With one ambiguous exception -- C. Dean Chapman -- the students were apparently all women. It would be interesting to know whether any of them continued their printmaking activities after graduation.

Japanese Katazome Calendars

According to Wikipedia,

"Katazome (型染め) is a Japanese method of dyeing fabrics using a resist paste applied through a stencil. With this kind of resist dyeing, a rice flour mixture is applied using a brush or a tool such as a palette knife. Pigment is added by hand-painting, immersion or both. Where the paste mixture covers and permeates the cloth, dye applied later will not penetrate."

In addition to its use on fabrics, the intricate stencil technique has been employed in printmaking on mulberry paper, as in the page-a-month wall calendars that have been produced regularly in Japan since the 1940s. They may possibly have been intended for Western markets, since the months, as in these examples from 1959, are in English.













The above images are from a set that apparently matches the one that George C. Baxley, one of the few English-language sources on the subject, says is "reported" to be the work of Keisuke Serizawa (1895-1984), a noted textile designer who created a katazome calendar annually for forty years or so.

The next image is an example of the label that would have accompanied each set of prints. This label happens to be an orphan, artist unknown.


This rather nice crab may belong with it, as the dates align correctly with March 1957.


Finally, some images I can't assign definitely to any particular year or designer, although they may belong together. Based on where the days of the week fall they could be from 1959, 1964, 1970, and so on.




When they were given to me a number of years ago, the prints were accompanied by a photocopied page that says, in part, "the Artist for this calendar for 1971 is Mr. Takeshi Nishijima, Professor of Art at Kyoto University. A graphic and textile designer, he has exhibited in numerous one man shows and won the coveted Grand Prize at the Kyoto Art Exhibit." As far as I can tell, however, none of the above examples are from 1971, and thus far I've found very little information on Takeshi Nishijima. He appears to have been active through the 1970s, producing calendars that were published by Wazome-Kogei in Kyoto.

The Japan Society in New York plans an exhibition devoted to Keisuke Serizawa beginning in October 2009. His katazome calendars, even if a sideline to his more important work (he was designated as a "Living National Treasure" in 1956) may well be represented. Yale University Press will publish the exhibition catalog, Serizawa: Master of Japanese Textile Design, also in the Fall.

(I have reworked the above since I first posted it, adding more images and moving one set to a subsequent post.)