| Transcript |
- develop a close and fruitful relationship which would last until the death of Watanabe in 1962. Shinsui produced a huge number of bijin-e prints display�ing a great deal of realism in his treatment of the face and figure. He created a real sense of drawing "in the round."
Other talented bijin-e print artists with whom Watanabe occasionally collaborated include Shuho Yamakawa (1898-1944) and Kiyoshi Kobayakawa (1896-1948). They, like Shinsui, produced delicate female por�traitures with mildly erotic overtones. One of the few notable bijin-e ar�tists who did not work with Watanabe was Kotondo Torii (1906-1976), who created beautiful prints of women styled after the works of Goyo and Shinsui. Kotondo worked mainly with the joint publishers Sakai and Kawaguchi.
In 1918 Watanabe began working with another young pupil of Kiyokata named Hasui Kawase. Hasui's first landscape prints met with critical ac�claim. Hasui, too, would go on to have a long, beneficial association with Watanabe. Hasui was able to create dream-like images of Japan untouched by the uglier forms of modernization and industrialization using a combina�tion of Western and Japanese artistic techniques, which was exactly what foreign collectors were interested in purchasing as well as some Japanese buyers.
In 1916 Watanabe spotted a marvellous painting of a celebrated actor by Shunsen Natori (1886-1960) and helped to turn it into an extremely fine print. The two would work together on one other print and then would not collaborate again until eight years later. Never giving up, Watanabe searched out another painter of actors named Koka Yamamura (1885-1942), who studied at the Tokyo Art School. Watanabe began working with him in 1917 to produce some very fine actor prints, which updated and modified the style of the actor prints of the traditional ukiyo-e masters, like Sharaku and Toyokuni. Koka was very skillful at capturing three-dimensionality by embracing Western ideas of perspectives and other design sensibilities, but he stopped designing prints in 1922.
In 1920 Watanabe began publishing the landscape prints of Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950). Yoshida produced seven prints with Watanabe and then like Goyo, left Watanabe and employed his own woodblock carvers and printers, whom he meticulously supervised at every stage of the print's production. He went on to design 249 more prints and earned an inter�national reputation unparalleled by any other shin hanga artist. Among foreigners, he is the best known and most loved of the shin hanga artists. His prints are often mistaken for watercolours because of the immense range of his shades and tones. Because of the tremendously varied soft, subtle colours, he was able to create a sense of depth and three-dimensionality. His
AGGV COLLECTS/SHIN HANGA 9
|
|---|
