LITMIR.BIZ

      AFTER YAMAMOTO TURNED TO OTHER ENTHUSIASMS leadership fell to such men as Koshiro Onchi (1891-1955). With a scant ten years between Yamamoto's birth and his, he represented a new generation of men to whom hanga was a career and not a bypath (sometimes passionately pursued, but still a by path). Onchi's span of activity reached back to the days of the magazine Ho sun, and in all that time there was never any question but that he was a hanga artist.

      He made up his mind to that almost as soon as he made up his mind to be an artist, both decisions being part of a pattern of revolt that carried him as far as possible from the kind of life he was brought up to.

      His father, happily on the other side of the fence from Yamamoto's grandfather, was a? ruggedly conservative member of Emperor Meiji's highly formal court. A gentleman of the old school, uncompromisingly honest and unswervingly loyal, he was a favorite with the emperor. He served for a time as the court's master of ceremonies and then at the emperor's request he took over the education and discipline of the three young princes who were destined to wed the emperor's daughters. Koshiro, youngest of Onchi's four sons, was raised with the princes in the rigid atmosphere that characterized old-line education of members of the imperial family. Late in life he recalled one treasonous moment when he disrupted that atmosphere by slapping the young Prince Higashikuni, though he couldn't remember what the prince did to deserve it. One of the last jobs of book design which Onchi completed before his death was the autobiography of the prince, now plain mister since he lost his tide after the war.

      Notwithstanding the slap, Onchi shared the princes' education under his stern and domineering father. He studied the Chinese classics with emphasis on Confucian doctrine, he spent long hours over his calligraphy, and he learned the classic theatre art of the nobility, Noh. He never forgot such roles as Yoshitsune in Funa-Benkei but he regarded Noh as fugitive from a museum, and the last time he saw a play was when, out of filial duty, he attended the farewell performance of a man to whom his father had been patron.

      It was planned that young Onchi would be a doctor, and he entered a German middle school in Tokyo which specialized in premedical training. While he was there one elder brother died of a heart attack and another of tuberculosis, and when a sister died in the same span of two years, Onchi lost whatever faith and interest he had once had in medicine. His early interest in art had been sternly suppressed by his father, but after the shock of losing three of his children the old man relented, and at the age of seventeen Onchi entered the government art academy at Ueno.

      However, any assumption that he was now happy in his chosen field would be premature. He was by this time in full revolt against his strict upbringing, and the authorities at Ueno bore the brunt of it. He shunned their compulsory athletics, he attended classes only when felt like it, and he painted as he chose. If this meant doing nudes in grey and blue instead of the warm fleshy tones demanded by the academy instructors, that was the way it was, and Onchi was not at all impressed by arguments that at least while he was a student he must paint as his instructors directed. On top of all this he was neglecting his oils for the absurd heresy of creative prints. In this atmosphere of mutual antagonism it is remarkable that Onchi's career at Ueno lasted as long as three years. When he was invited to leave, his departure was a double farewell, for at the same time he abandoned oil painting. From then on he devoted himself to hanga.

      His decision to make hanga his career was influenced partly by the work of Yamamoto and the others in Hosun, but even more by the work of Europeans like Wassily Kandinsky and Edvard Munch, whose prints were then being reproduced in Tokyo. "I was especially impressed by Munch's expression of human feeling," Onchi said, "not his form but his content."

      During the next ten or fifteen years creative prints and Onchi grew up together. He threw himself into the movement, and his fighting spirit gloried in the fact that the whole art world was lined up in opposition.

      "At first we were simply ignored," he said, "and then, when we couldn't be ignored, we were ridiculed. All the shows were run by oil painters. If we were allowed to submit our work, it was hung on some remote wall and judged in the same category as the oils, by a jury composed of oil painters. Of course we got nowhere. The critics? They acted as if we didn't exist."

      To further the cause he poured his energy and whatever money he could find into a series of art and literary magazines, most of which expired after a few issues. But he kept on fighting, and since he loved a good fight he had a fine time.

      He didn't seriously try to earn money to support his family until the devastating earthquake of 1923 jolted him into a new sense of responsibility. His wife still recalls her excitement when he received fifty yen for a book design, the pleasant shock when she realized that her husband, too, could make money. Though he started late, from then on he earned a very comfortable living as one of Japan's foremost book designers. His early training in calligraphy may have contributed something too, for Onchi was regarded as a superlative designer of lettering, if that word may be stretched to include the complex ideographs used both in China and Japan.

      Much as he revolted against it, his early environment must have been decisive in yet another respect, for his tastes were essentially aristocratic. He shunned Yamamoto's school for farmers and did not hesitate to express his displeasure with peasant art, an attitude that did not endear him to the powerful mingei group, which has sponsored the great revival of folk arts and crafts.

      Onchi was deeply Japanese, but from the beginning of his career any overt Japanese influence on his work was negligible. He liked that considerable portion of Japanese art which is dominated by simplicity and elegance, but he never turned back to it for stimulation, and against ukiyoe he conducted full-scale rebellion. Elise Grilli, art critic of the Nippon Times, put it this way: "Onchi delighted in flaunting the conventions of ukiyoe prints. The meticulous craftsmanship, the virtuosity of line, the hair-raisingly painstaking printing from twenty or thirty separate blocks, the finicky precision in overlapping the colors, and, in recent times, the overwhelming cleverness in naturalistic representation—all this he threw out the window with a single toss and a hearty laugh. Now he could breathe again, freed from the claptrap of academic accretions."

      Though he never went to Europe—his only trips outside Japan were to Formosa and later, in 1939, as an army artist to China—he was consistently oriented to the European rather than the Japanese, to the new rather than the old. This orientation is obviously reflected in his abstract work. In deference to realists like Yamamoto he made realistic prints for exhibition until World War II loosened his inhibitions, but abstract art had always been his paramount interest, and during the last ten or fifteen years of his life his output was almost entirely abstract. It was in these later years that he wrote: "Abstract art is now, as it should be, the main way of art, and I hope that our civilization soon comes to realize this. My work falls short of my expectations, short of what I want it to be, but I keep it up as one pioneer doing his part to cultivate this vast land. If my work happens to be poor, the fault is mine alone and not that of the method."

      To Onchi hanga was not only a great medium but one uniquely suited to abstract art. He stressed this in his book, The Modern Hanga of Japan:

      "Among the mediums of hanga the one most removed from the brush painting is the woodcut. A woodcut is best when the chisel in the wood is used most naturally. The virtue of hanga lies in the certainty that it comes from a creative process which permits no sham. Unlike brush painting, it allows no wavering of the hand. It is honest—sham and errors show. Some liberty may be allowed in the registry but so little that it, like the carving, is a process which permits no delusion... hanga rejects the accidental and rejects ornamentation... and it contains the most constructive process in graphic art, the advantage of superimposing pictures. For this reason hanga is probably the most suitable method yet found for the expression of modern art, which lays stress on construction."

      His emphasis on abstract art gave rise to one misunderstanding, a common belief that he did not regard the ability to draw as important to the hanga artist. Onchi could draw with mastery. "Of course," he said, "one must

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