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Modern Japanese Prints - Statler. Oliver Statler
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isbn 9781462909551
Автор произведения Oliver Statler
Издательство Ingram
In the years after his graduation, Yamamoto devoted himself almost entirely to creative hanga, and then in 1912, amid speculation that he was running away to heal a broken heart, he went to Paris. He stayed in Europe until late 1916 and artistically these years were among the most productive of his life. He sent back prints to repay those who had helped finance his journey and he supported himself by his prints and oils and his old skill at illustration by wood engraving. Many of his finest prints were made in Paris from 1912 to 1914, among them On the Deck (print 1), A Small Bay in Brittany (print 2), and Yanchin, a picture of three Chinese courtesans. He had another burst of activity just after he returned to Japan, including Woman of Brittany (print 5) and the Moscow prints (prints 6 and 7), the latter inspired by his homeward journey through Russia. That was a fateful journey for Yamamoto because he saw in Russia some schools for peasants which excited him about the possibilities of adult education for farmers. He lingered there, fascinated by those schools.
Back in Japan, he plunged again into the growing creative-print movement. He was the central figure in organizing the hanga artists into the association which still exists, and in preparing the association's first show, held during January 1919 at the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi. It was a good beginning, a big and successful exhibit of the work of twenty-five artists, including two Englishmen then resident in Japan, Bernard Leach and W. Westley Manning.
And then in 1919 Yamamoto embarked on another crusade. He could not get over his dream of a school for farm people. He went to Shinshu, to the village of Oya where his father had practiced medicine. In that country, high in the central mountains, the long cold winters brought dullness and apathy, with little to do but sit in the kotatsu, the pit in the floor where the charcoal fire underneath the blankets kept at least the lower body warm. To Yamamoto this waste of life was an irresistible challenge. His solution was a school where the people could learn the kind of art and handicrafts which would both enrich their lives and make it possible for them to augment their meager incomes during the slack winter.
He gathered a staff of instructors and started an ambitious program of woodcarving, textile weaving and dyeing, and some painting and print-making. Yamamoto was not a man of small ideas, and he did not envision his school on a small scale. He solicited help from both government and private agencies, and among his largest grants were four thousand yen each from the Education Ministry, the Agriculture Ministry, and the Mitsubishi interests. These were annual pledges, and not inconsiderable money for those days when the yen was worth about half a dollar and the dollar rather more than it is today. But Yamamoto found it harder to maintain interest than to excite it in the first place. His big subsidies dwindled to half the original figure and, after five years, stopped. And in Oya the mayor of the village, who had been an enthusiastic supporter, went bankrupt. The school charged no fees, support was increasingly scarce, and finances became an overriding worry. Always there was the nagging necessity to hunt for patrons.
That was not his only trouble. Because he had gotten his idea in Russia, the police always suspected that he was teaching communism and continually harassed him on that score. Un'ichi Hiratsuka, who for a while taught frame-making at the school, recalls that when he was preparing for his first trip to Shinshu he received a letter from Yamamoto. Yamamoto described his difficulties with the police and diffidently asked Hiratsuka, who is deeply conservative but who likes to work in a Russian-style jacket, if he would forego that costume at Shinshu. And, he added, the police seemed to mistrust long hair and would Hiratsuka mind too much getting a haircut.
"Yamamoto was a fine artist but a terrible businessman," says Tsuruzo Ishii. "When he started the school I told him that he should restrict his activity to teaching art and crafts, but he thought he would fail if he couldn't prove to the farmers that they could make money out of what they were learning. So he was continually involved in trying to sell their products, and all these efforts lost money.
"It was the same with his other crusade. He threw himself into a campaign to change the methods of teaching art in the public schools. He called it free art, the idea being that students were to sketch from nature instead of copying the pictures in textbooks. Of course he stirred up a battle with the textbook people and old-line art teachers, but his campaign was finally scuttled by an unfortunate business deal: his only interest was to make a better quality of art supplies available to students, but the whole thing ended in bankruptcy. Both the Shinshu school and the free-art movement were good ideas doomed by bad management.
"I was always trying to get him to give up these crusades of his and do some painting. He was a stubborn and a dedicated man, but after fifteen years of struggling and with both ventures failing, he was tired out, and in 1935 he did settle down in Tokyo. For the first time since Paris he seriously worked at his own art. In the next five or six years he did some fine work, oils and water colors, and he climaxed this activity with a one-man show at Mitsukoshi in January 1940."
The show opened in an aura of good feeling. The antagonisms and bitterness of the past were forgotten, and both long-time friends and former enemies rallied around to celebrate his return to art with an impressive testimonial dinner. Yamamoto was in a happy and expansive mood when he rose to say: "I shall live until I'm eighty-five. I shall live until May of my eighty-fifth year. Therefore, I am going to sit back now, and drink sake, and paint to my heart's content."
He was a poor prophet. Two years later he was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage, which ended his career. In the spring he was taken back to Shinshu in the hope that the mountains would aid his convalescence, but he never fully recovered, and he died in October 1946 at the age of sixty-four.
It was near the end of his illness that he got out of bed and took a hatchet to the blocks for his woodprints. He had carved them of solid sakura and undoubtedly many more prints could have been run off from them. If this was the thought that got him up to destroy them, it was in character. For a man who believed so deeply in creative prints it must have been anathema that somebody else might print from his blocks, and a final act of passionate conviction is a fitting end to his story.
That he was thwarted in this, as he had been so often before, is perhaps only consistent with the pattern of his life. Years before, when they were closing up the school at Oya, they had found there the blocks for his great print of Moscow (print 6). A friend who was helping asked for them, and Yamamoto gave them to him. Today there are plans to run some more prints from these blocks.
"What kind of man was he?"
Ishii reflected. "When an idea excited him he would bury himself in it. Sacrifice meant nothing. It was the same with creative hanga, his school, and his free-art movement. He was a selfless man, a passionate man, a man of great sensitivity. I guess if I had to describe him in one word it would be—artist."
2. A Small Bay in Brittany (1913?)
3. Fisherman (1904)
4. French Pastoral in Spring (1913?)
5. Woman of Brittany (1920)
6. Moscow Street (1916?)
7. Moscow (1917?)