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MUNAKATA SHIKO: JAPANESE MASTER OF THE MODERN PRINT w/ NO CUTS

RSS/mk set 11-27

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened the first comprehensive retrospective of art by Munakata Shiko, long considered one of Japan’s greatest Twentieth Century artists and recipients of the prestigious Imperial Order of Culture from the Japanese government. “Munakata Shiko: Japanese Master of the Modern Print” showcases 378 woodblock prints, paintings, calligraphies and ceramics that cover the artist’s entire career and demonstrates how Munakata successfully merged ancient with modern and Japanese with Western style. The works will be on view through March 2.

The exhibition presents major works from the collection of the Munakata Museum in Kamakura, including “Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Sakyamuni” and “Nature through the Twelve Months,” which received international acclaim, winning the Medal Luzica Matarazzo, the top prize in the print category at the São Paulo Biennale in 1955, and the grand prize in the print division in the Venice Biennale in 1956. The exhibition also showcases fine examples of Munakata’s calligraphies from LACMA’s permanent collection.

The works in the exhibition are mounted on the original screens and scrolls designed by the artist, many with unconventional vibrant colors that enhance the art.

Munakata Shiko was born in 1903, the sixth child of a poor blacksmith in Aomori, the northernmost perfecture of Honshu. Although extremely nearsighted, Munakata grew up with vivid memories of the intense colors of local festival kites and parade floats, and the vibrant lantern paintings in local shrines. At the age of 17, he decided to become and artist. A year later, he saw a reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s “Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers,” which shook the artist’s heart and had a profound effect on his life and career. With the conviction that he was going to “become Van Gogh,” Munakata left Aomori for Tokyo in September 1924.

Munakata became a woodblock printmaker for two reasons: his nearsightedness and his belief that the Japanese woodblock print was equal to Western painting. Munakata distanced himself from modern Western art by asserting that the woodblock print was a distinctive Japanese art form rivaling anything being created in the West. He rejected returning to Japanese artistic styles of the past, such as ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world); instead he decided to create his own unique form of hanga (woodblock prints).

Because of his limited eyesight, Munakata would carve a block with his face almost touching the board. Although he often prepared preliminary sketches, they were merely guides; once his hand, gripping the carving knife, began to move, it would not stop. From right to left, with fierce speed, he would carve freely and spontaneously, and images would begin to appear as if already concealed in the wood.

The exhibition begins with works from the artist’s early years, 1924 to 1944, considered his “black and white” period. During this time, Munakata created prints such as “The Pantheon of the Gandavyuha-sutra” (1936), in which black line is imbued with a vital force, and “In Praise of the Four Cardinal Points” (1941), where the composition occupies the entire white surface, with bold figures outlined sharply in black.

By the mid-1930s to the 1940s, Munakata had revolutionized the concept of scale in the Japanese woodblock print, liberating it from the small-scale traditional ukiyo-e format of the Edo period (1615-1868) and creating enormous pieces for screen and wall murals.

The exhibition next presents masterpieces from the years 1945 and 1959 when Munakata produced many major works, each embodying his continuous experimentation with radically new techniques that he absorbed from Western artists including the German Expressionists.

As Munakata Shiko wrestled to create strong, compassionate, and propitiatory figures for his woodblocks, his imagery was deeply inspired by poetry, literary prose, and Buddhist texts. His images featured poems or prose, to the extent that in some prints the text itself was the visual motif that anchored the pictorial arrangement, occasionally overriding attendant images.

In his later years, Munakata produced a diverse range of works based on distinctly Japanese tales, poetry, images of women, flowers and birds, and landscapes and scenes of nature, as well as subjects related to Buddhism and indigenous deities.

Although Munakata is the best-known Japanese printmaker of the Twentieth Century, he is also regarded as one of the finest calligraphers of his time. It is impossible to overstate the centrality of calligraphy in the visual arts of China and Japan; indeed, the art of painting, while employing similar brushes, is ranked below calligraphy in the aesthetic hierarchy of East Asian art. Because the precise stroke order and overall form cannot be violated if the calligraphy is to be readable, it is much more difficult for a calligrapher to break new ground or to produce an easily identifiable style.

Museum hours are Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, noon to 8 pm; Friday, noon to 9 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am to 8 pm. Call 323-857-6000 or visit www.lacma.org.