Matthew Messmer
Matthew Messmer
On Friday, Nov 9 at 7 pm the Floating World Gallery on
Halsted Ave a few blocks north of North Ave in Chicago will have an opening of
Matthew Messmer's work.
On Oct 27 the gallery had a seminar on Sosaku Hanga and I
took notes while there. Below are the notes from the seminar. It was very good
and interesting and I saw many really interesting and engaging prints.
Elias Martin of the Floating World Gallery in Chicago
gave a seminar today about Sosaku Hanga (Creative Hanga).
Japanese Spirit: The Woodblock prints of Takumi Itow
He showed about 50
prints from artists of this era, stating with Yamamoto Kanai, who started the
movement ca. 1904, the year before the end of the Russian-Japanese war, in
which an eastern power defeated a western power for the first time in modern
history.
The era of Sosaku Hanga started with repression of
artists. Japan was struggling to become a military power and not suffer the
fate of India and China under the western powers. The government banned these
artists’ works from Art Fairs and they had to rely on sales to other artists or
other forms of art such as oil painting to support themselves. This situation continued
until after WWII.
He focused on prints by a few later artists, particularly
Minami Kunzo, who worked in the UK ca. 1914, Umeiji (1914), who influenced
other artists including Koshiro Onjei. These artists were in the vanguard of
showing things as they actually existed, rather an idealized world. For
example, Ishi Hakute showed someone at a lumberyard selecting wood and a bleak
city scape by Ishi Hakute.
During the US occupation of Japan, starting in 1945, many
collectors came to appreciate their work and Elias showed examples of
large-scale works that were intended to be displayed publicly, perhaps in a
frame. These were mostly bleed prints with no borders. After all, oil paintings
don’t have a border!
The gallery owns four separate printings of a large
(about 40 x 60 cm) portrait of a apoet, Hagiwara done by Oichi, Sukino, Oichi’s
son and finally Oichi at a later time. These were all printed from the same
blocks and they give very different visual impressions!
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Finally, a number of really lovely prints by Saito Kiyoshi were shown, and
Elias pointed out that the influence of Gaugin was there to see. He was a
favorite of collectors post-WWII.
The Sosaku Hanga era ended ca. 1960. Takumi Itow, whose
exhibition I wrote about earlier, is a student of a Sosaku Hanga artist.
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