Exhibitions 1
Hiroshige: Images of Mist, Rain, Moon and Snow
(Royal Academy, till 28 September)
Japanese master
Martin Gayford
Walk into Monet's elegant dining- room at Giverny, and you will find Japanese prints on the walls. In the back- ground of Manet's portrait of Emile Zola you will find the same. In the late 19th cen- tury, ownership of wood-block prints from Japan was a badge of membership of the avant-garde, rather as having a pickled sheep in your dining-room would be today. Therefore, one surmises, to Western eyes they must then have appeared shockingly, fascinatingly new. That is a little hard to believe, however, as one walks round the effortlessly enjoyable exhibition of prints by Hiroshige currently at the Royal Academy. Indeed, there are exact prototypes on show here for many of the works of the 19th-century European avant-garde. A few years before Whistler painted a falling rocket in the night sky above the Thames, Hiroshige did the same in 'Fireworks Over Ryogoku Bridge'. Van Gogh actually made copies of a couple of Hiroshige prints in this show.
So the aspects of Japanese prints that once seemed so novel — tight cropping, the raking angles, the objects in looming close-up framing a distant scene, the bold simplification into telling silhouettes probably all seem more normal to the aver- age gallery-goer today than, say, the convolutions of Mannerism or the Baroque. Conversely — it is less widely realised Japanese artists of Hiroshige's period were becoming influenced by Western art. 'View of a Canal in the Snow' of 1834-5, for example, finds him experimenting with a single point perspective which would have been utterly familiar to 15th-century Flo- rentine painters such as Uccello. So Japanese prints of this period form a bridge between the taste of Orient and Occident. Just as we in the West, trained by van Gogh et al., find Hiroshige and Hokusai easy to appreciate, so the Japanese find Impressionist and Post- Impressionist art far easier to assimilate than other products of the West (witness their interest at auctions, and the corre- sponding dizzy height of prices). This sense of familiarity may be decep- tive. There are doubtless many aspects of Hiroshige's original meaning that are lost on us, especially on those of us who do not read Japanese. Often the prints are inscribed with poems, some of which are translated in the catalogue. But the con- temporary and cultural resonance of geese flying across the moon or a temple precinct under snow are even more difficult to res- urrect than those of the art of the Euro- pean past. Japan, before Admiral Perry sailed in and forcibly opened it to the out- side world, was a sealed and very remote place.
Still, Utagawa Hiroshige did for it, and especially for Edo its capital, what Canalet- to did for 18th-century Venice. The bridges, the mountains with huge moons above them caught in the branches of a tree, the shrines, the paper lanterns, the plum blossom, the snow at New Year — all these add to a composite image of old Japan. It is hard now not to see it through Hiroshige's eyes.
With the older Hokusai, he was the great master of the Japanese landscape print. But, in comparison with Hokusai — or indeed by any standards — he was immensely prolific. He is known to have designed over 5,000 prints in a career that lasted some 40 years (he died in 1858 aged 62). Some of these were issued in editions of up to 50,000 — individual examples of which may look very different from each other.
The Japanese print was clearly a truly popular art, and — to a greater extent than equivalents in the West — the result of a team effort. The designer provided the print publisher with an ink drawing in black and white, which, to judge from examples by Hiroshige on show, could be surprisingly loose and free. This design was then care- fully cut into a block — the key block with the block-cutter apparently supplying a good deal of the detail.
Then a separate block was made for each colour which was to be used, the designer indicating what the colours should be. But again there was good deal of latitude, the colours varying from print to print, and tending to become less detailed and more garish as time went on and the block became worn. Endless modulation also came in through sophistications such as bokashi — whereby some of the colour could be wiped from a block to suggest the soft transitions of mist or sky. Japanese connoisseurs discriminate between nine grades of quality in Hiroshige prints.
The artist himself came from that inter- mediate class between high and low from which so many creative and enterprising people spring. He was by heredity a minor samurai — compared by the catalogue to a non-commissioned officer. He was a fire- officer, in charge of extravagantly tattooed Japanese firemen — and lived in samurai barracks until he was 46 years old. To eke out an income, lowly samurai were in the habit of doing this and that: some raised goldfish, flowers or singing insects, Hiroshige designed prints.
His first triumph as a print designer, `The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road', was traditionally thought to have been inspired by a journey in which he accompanied the white horse annually pre- sented to the emperor by the shogun from Edo to Kyoto. The catalogue is doubtful about this in the way that scholarship is always doubtful of colourful stories. But in any case Hiroshige, with Hokusai, became the great master of Japanese topography, producing views of notable spots in town and countryside — and also, less interest- ingly, of flowers, birds, fish and other sub- jects.
It was an activity that might seem to mir- ror the topographical obsessions of early 19th-century England. Hiroshige turned out views of Mount Fuji and Shinto shrines, at much the same time that his The Station of Nagakubo' by Utagawa Hiroshige older contemporary, Turner, was doing the same for the Alps and ruined abbeys. In Japan, however, there was much less emphasis on working directly on the spot. Many of his designs seem to have been worked up from sources including guide- books.
His skill was to create a vivid design from poetic, evocative ingredients. In that, the technical discipline of the print was — as technical limitations often are — a tremen- dous spur. That is the origin of the telling simplification, the graphic clarity, the flat planes of colour, the use of little to suggest much.
This exhibition is an invaluable supple- ment to the endless Impressionist, Post- Impressionist and early Modernist shows that appear at the RA and elsewhere. When one has seen it, radical late 19th- century European art looks a little less novel, a little more oriental. Those who want to explore the world of Hiroshige fur- ther, or like Monet hang one in the dining- room, will want to visit the selling exhibition of his prints round the corner at the Mercury Gallery, Cork Street. Prices there start around £500.
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