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- The first major setback for the shin hanga movement was the Great Earthquake of 1923, and the second was World War II. Just before and during the war, foreign demand for the prints collapsed and few new prints were made.
After the war, Watanabe's son-in-law and heir, Tadasu, took over the print store and did a booming business selling shin hanga prints to the occupation forces. The large stock of old prints sold well and new wood�blocks which had not been published were immediately printed to meet the demand. However, few new shin hanga prints were being made except for those by Shinsui, Hasui and Shunsen, and with the deaths of the four major players in the field, Hasui in 1937, Shunsen in i960, Watanabe in 1962 and Shinsui in 1972, the movement was finished.
The shin hanga movement lasted about fifty years from 1913 to about 1962, with its glory days from 1913 to 1937. Shin hanga was the last flowering of traditional realistic prints, and with the death of its greats, the romantic look at Japan's past through prints was finished. After the war, sosaku hanga, or creative prints, displaced shin hanga in popularity. Sosaku hanga artists like Munakata and Saito were winning many awards at home and abroad.
With the exception of a few, almost all the great shin hanga artists collaborated with Watanabe at one point or another. The characteristics of Watanabe's collaborations include technical challenges, fine handmade paper and other common features include the use of a goma-zuri back�ground, where the printer uses the edges of the baren to create dense coils or swirls of darker colour against an otherwise plain background. As well his nature studies of birds often showed embossing of the feathers.
Foreigners using
the Japanese Woodblock Techniques
In the early 20th century a number of European and American artists living in Japan and Asia began producing colour woodblock prints using the ukiyo-e method with a team of carvers and printers.
Amongst the most successful Europeans was the Austrian, Fritz Capelari (n.d.). Capelari was one of the first artists to work with Watanabe to produce prints based on his paintings in 1913. This collaboration was instrumental in the popularization of shin hanga, as Watanabe would per�suade Japanese artists to try the woodblock print medium by showing them Capelari's prints and the potential for their own work.
Watanabe also persuaded the British painter and etcher, Charles W. Bartlett (1860-1940), to convert his paintings into woodblock prints. In 1916 many of Bartlett's watercolours of Indian scenes were turned into prints and were commercially quite successful.
AGGV COLLECTS/SHIN HANGA 7 7
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