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- Introduction
Japan�s contemporary prints are amongst the highest calibre in the world, and command the admiration of printmakers, connoisseurs and collectors throughout the world. These prints have developed from a rich Japanese printmaking tradition, which dates back several centuries and had its origins in China. In fact, usually one�s most immediate reaction to the words �Japanese prints" is a mental image not of twentieth-century prints but of the classical ukiyo-e prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The earliest polychrome prints in Japan were coloured by hand, but around 1765, the technique of overprinting colours from different blocks was introduced, resulting in prints of great beauty and intricacy. It is interesting to note that the ukiyo-e tradition was the astonishing outcome of collaboration among several people: the master who provided the original design in the form of a painting or detailed sketch; the artisan who carved the design onto the woodblock; a third person who coloured the blocks and printed the picture; and the publisher who was responsible for financing and distribution.
These fantastic works of art, beautifully designed and executed, were not only popular with the Japanese masses, but even found their way to Europe as wrapping paper in tea chests, where they were discovered and came to exert a tremendous influence on artists such as Degas, Matisse, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. And the excitement which they engendered then, still lingers on to this day. Most people in the West have been captivated by these fabulous prints, especially the slender beauties by Utamaro, the glaring Kabuki actors by Sharaku and the magnificent landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868, which was ushered in by Commodore Perry�s knock on the door in 1853, opened Japan to the West after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation. This brought with it an un�discriminating mania for things Western, and soon Japan was deluged with foreign influences forcing rapid modernization and industrialization. The unbounded and unreasoning enthusiasm that spread through the nation�s industrial sector also affected the intellectual and artistic com�munity. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese students of the arts went to study abroad in great numbers, plunging headlong into Western art and sweeping aside their traditional artistic heritage including the ukiyo-e print. The tradition of fine ukiyo-e prints had declined sharply with the death of Hiroshige in 1858, but it was the influence of European nineteenth-century Realism that made the artistic downfall decisive. The ukiyo-e print was never to be revived.
However, while studying in the West, many Japanese artists discovered that ukiyo-e prints had exerted an enormous influence on Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in Europe. Previously these prints were regarded as beneath the dignity of important Japanese art circles, but this admira�tion from foreigners caused them to take a second look. It gave the Japanese artists a new respect and feeling of confidence in their nation�s traditional art forms.
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