Woodcuts at the Chazen

The Chazen Museum of Art here in Madison currently has an exhibition called "Color Woodcut International: Japan, Britain, and America in the Early Twentieth Century".

Color woodcut printmaking was not new to Britain or America when Japanese prints caught the European and American imagination in the nineteenth century. The fresh colors, the simplicity of the materials, and the departure from traditional compositions entranced western artists as well as the rest of the public. In France, this enthusiasm for all things Japanese was called Japonisme, and it influenced artists such as Toulouse Lautrec and Henri Rivière. Likewise, Japanese audiences and artists were intrigued by the possibilities of western art, which was broadly available by the end of the nineteenth century. Artists such as Hiroshige II created images of the strange foreigners and imagined what American cities looked like. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, artists were not content to merely imagine what the other side of the world looked like. As a result, a growing number of artists traveled back and forth between the continents, seeing, learning from and teaching each other. From America, Arthur Wesley Dow and Bertha Lum traveled to Japan to learn the techniques of color woodblock printmaking, while from Japan, Hiroshi Yoshida, Mokuchu Urushibara, and Ohara Shoson traveled to the West in search of imagery and patronage.

I found this interesting because I happen to have a few Japanese woodblock prints. In fact, I brought them to the Chazen a couple years ago and had a couple professors give them a once-over. Unfortunately, I cannot find my notes so I cannot give you any names or dates. But here they are:















The exhibition runs through 25 February and there are a number of lectures being held about it. A list can be found here.