Traumatic Memory • William Kentridge • Combat Paper Project • Eric Avery • China 1946 • Japanese War Games Gerald Cramer • Marcantonio • Kingdom of Images • Associated American Artists • Garo Antreasian • News

The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas January – February 2017

Volume 6, Number 5

US $25

Editor-in-ChiefSusan Tallman

Associate PublisherJulie Bernatz

Managing EditorIsabella Kendrick

Associate EditorJulie Warchol

Manuscript EditorPrudence Crowther

Online ColumnistSarah Kirk Hanley

Editor-at-LargeCatherine Bindman

Design DirectorSkip Langer

January – February 2017Volume 6, Number 5

In This Issue

Susan Tallman 2On Trauma

Kate McCrickard 4William Kentridge: Drawing Has its Own Memory

Jared Ash 11 The Combat Paper Project

Marjorie B. Cohn 16Eric Avery’s AIDS Works

Shaoqian Zhang 20Woodcuts in the Aftermath of War

Rhiannon Paget 24Sugoroku of Imperial and Wartime Japan

Exhibition ReviewsPaul Coldwell 30Gérald Cramer in Geneva

Genevieve Verdigel 32Stepping out of Raphael’s Shadow

Carand Burnet 34Creative Printmakers in Japan

Book ReviewsVictoria Sancho Lobis 36French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV

Brian D. Cohen 38Art in (Middle) America

Peter S. Briggs 41Garo Antreasian and American Lithography

Prix de Print, No. 21 44Juried by Trevor WinkfieldA Cloud in Trousers by Thorsten Dennerline

Art in Art in Print Number 6 46Eric AveryPrint Life: Neurogenesis 2016

News of the Print World 49

Contributors 64

On the Mailing Bag: Eric Avery, RX (2014–16) for Art in Art in Print. Original artwork letterpress-printed by the artist and Dave DiMarchi.

Cover: Eli Wright, Broken Soldiers (2009), screenprint on hand-stitched handmade paper from military uniforms. Courtesy the artist.

This Page: William Kentridge, detail of Four Instruments (2003), drypoint. Printed by Randy Hemminghaus, Galamander Press, New York. Published by David Krut, New York.

Art in Print3500 N. Lake Shore DriveSuite 10AChicago, IL 60657-1927www.artinprint.org info@artinprint.org1.844.ARTINPR (1.844.278.4677)No part of this periodical may be published without the written consent of the publisher.

Art in Print is supported in part by an award from the

National Endowment for the Arts. Art Works.

Art in Print January – February 201734

“Hanga Now: Contemporary Japanese Printmakers”University of Saint Joseph Art MuseumWest Hartford, CT23 September – 18 December 2016

Attenuated lines, shimmering gild- ing, gossamer textures and deft compositions suffused the exhibition “Hanga Now: Contemporary Japanese Printmakers” at the University of Saint Joseph in Hartford. More than 60 wood-cuts, etchings, lithographs and mono-types by 35 artists—most produced during the past 25 years—attest to the ongoing vitality of Japan’s sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement. Selected by curator Ann Sievers, these prints do not ask the viewer to gaze from afar; they beckon us closer.

The famous ukiyo-e prints of the 18th and 19th centuries are often aesthetically pleasing but were intended as commer-cial products, made to reflect the mar-ket rather than personal expression, and they were produced through a system of specialized painters, block cutters, print-ers and publishers, working in separate

stages. In the first decade of the 20th century, however, artists such as Hakutei Ishii, Kanae Yamamoto and Kogan Tobari adopted the European practice of design-ing, cutting and printing their own works in small editions.

Sōsaku-hanga brought the Western emphasis on individuality to bear on Japanese techniques and aesthetics. Mov-ing away from the popular-cultural sub-jects of ukiyo-e, these artists explored landscapes and figures that offered an opportunity for abstraction and creative manipulation. They also strove to make visible the singular characteristics of the artist’s hand, as is evident in Yamamoto’s woodblock Fisherman (1904), where rough carved lines contour the figure and set-ting.1 After World War II, the reputation of such prints grew, both inside and out-side Japan. Once scorned by critics and categorized as a craft (and labeled as such by the Japan Art Academy to this day),2 by 1951 sōsaku-hanga had gained global stat-ure: in that year’s São Paulo Art Biennial the only Japanese artists to win awards were the printmakers Tetsuro Komai and Kiyoshi Saito.

The quintessence of harmony—a time-honored Japanese value—is appar-ent in the technical control of breath-taking mezzotints by Yozo Hamaguchi (1909–2000), Toru Iwaya (b. 1936) and Katsunori Hamanishi (b. 1949). Hama-guchi’s Field on Deep Blue (1985–1992) presents a band of multicolored striations that emerge from navy-colored paper— a hilly landscape distilled into a gradient structure of color, shadow and highlights.

Reika Iwami (b. 1927), a pioneering woman in the creative print movement, incorporates both the real and the mys-tical in lyrical terrains. In Water of Mt. Fuji (2002) she omits most physical detail, disrupting the silhouette of Japan’s iconic mountain with a vaporous gray pattern suggestive of clouds or undulating water, and a waving band of gold leaf that glis-tens like a river. Such material enhance-ments of the paper surface are frequent in her work: the black background in Poem of Water (1971) is strewn with glitter-ing dust, causing it to appear to levitate in the light, and Border of the Sea God’s Realm (1999) includes an embossed tear-drop-sized silhouette that hovers over

EXHIBITION REVIEW

Sharpened Imagination: Creative Printmakers in JapanBy Carand Burnet

Hamanishi Katsunori, Japanese Classic Calendar (2015), mezzotint printed in color, each panel 59.6 x 36.1 cm (quadriptych). Art Museum, University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford, CT. Purchase with a gift from Edwina Bosco ’50. ©Hamanishi Katsunori.

Art in Print January – February 2017 35

a topography of roaming shapes. The woodblocks of Hidehiko Goto (b.  1953) evoke the movement of water even more abstractly: in Silent Light (2012) the grain of the woodblock provides an illusion of liquid condensation within a rectilinear composition veiled in a blue.

One of the striking features of these prints is the abundance of gold leaf. More than a third of the works on view incor-porated gold, and not only in woodblock. Shuji Wako’s (b. 1953) immaculately com-posed Right on Target (2007) uses lithogra-phy’s tonal attributes to render a peculiar, if visually convincing, still life—a fragile ball supporting a target pierced by two arrows, perched above carefully drawn kimono fabric. Each of these objects is elaborately embellished with gold leaf. Unlike Wako, Yoshikatsu Tamekane (b. 1959) exploits gold leaf as an adaptable, textural medium that can be lightened, layered or obscured. The thinly applied, irregular gold in the corner of his abstract woodblock and collagraph print White Nocturne (1997) reveals color beneath its radiant surface.

Natural forms and materials are only part of the story, however. Sōsaku-hanga artists have also explored found and prefabricated images, adapting, colla-ging and recomposing them as personal statements. Tetsuya Noda’s (b.  1940) Diary 471 Dec 26 ’09 (2009) is part of an ongoing project—now totaling over 500

prints—based on memories illustrated in the artist’s journal. An open cookie box, seen from above, is tinted with green and yellow, recalling the hand-colored albu-men prints that were widely popular in Japan in the mid- to late-19th century. Other artists favor bold color and pat-tern: in Yuji Hiratsuka’s (b. 1954) etching and aquatint Medieval River (2016), violet water is enclosed by pink-shaded, snowy ground. The repeating branches, leaves and flowers of the multicolored forest merges into a wondrous, chromatic tap-estry.

Nobuyuki Oura’s (b. 1949) Holding Per-spective Portfolio (1981–1983) appropriates and juxtaposes popular images—histori-cal photographs, anatomical illustra-tions, natural specimens—in complex, symbolic self-portraits in screenprint and lithography. The overlaid parts combine in ways that recall Japanese textile pat-terns, but his work exhibits the complexi-ties of Japanese identity within a global contemporary art world. (The inclusion of photographs of Emperor Hirohito within Holding Perspective was perceived as disrespectful by the prefecture of Toyama, and museum catalogues con-taining the work were destroyed.)3

All the prints in “Hanga Now: Con-temporary Japanese Printmakers,” dem-onstrate precision, and no space on the paper goes unnoticed. The innovative work of sōsaku-hanga printmakers exudes

everything from a refreshing simplicity to incredible complexity, as their one-of-a-kind viewpoints are honed from a sen-sitivity to their medium. “Creative” printmakers are always alert to the nuances of their own lyrical vision, and “Hanga Now” is no exception. Printmak-ing in Japan is alive and well, shining with grace and possibility.

Carand Burnet is an essayist, poet and arts correspondent.

Notes:1. There was also a concurrent movement in modern Japanese printmaking that revived the collaborative system, known as shin-hanga, or “new print.”2. Michiaki Kawakita, “The Modern Japanese Print,” in Contemporary Japanese Prints, tr. John Bester (Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha Interna-tional, 1967), xiii–xv.3. Tomo Kosuga, “The Art of Taboo: Nobuyuki Oura,” Vice Magazine video, 7:58, 21 October 2016, http://www.vice.com/en_ca/video/the-art-of-taboo-nobuyuki-oura-japan.

Left: Goto Hidehiko, Silent Light from the portfolio Hope: Aspirations in the Abstract (2012), woodcut printed in color, 49.5 x 37.5 cm. Art Museum, University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford, CT. Purchase with a gift from Edwina Bosco ’50. ©Goto Hidehiko. Right: Tamekane Yoshikatsu, White Nocturne (1997), woodcut, gold leaf, embossing and mica powder, 50.8 x 69.9 cm. Collection of Ronald A. and Pamela J. Lake. ©Tamekane Yoshikatsu.