Anna Hotchkis: A Scottish Painter-Printmaker in China

Gordon, who runs the Modern Printmakers blog, recently introduced me to the work of Anna Mary Hotchkis (1885-1984).  Hotchkis was born in Crookston, Renfrewshire and studied art initially at the Glasgow School of Art.  After a year, she and her sisters Isobel and Margaret, became part of a circle of female art students studying in Munich with Hans Lasker.  When her family moved to Edinburgh, Hotchkis transferred to the Edinburgh College of Art for the remainder of her training under Robert Burns.

Anna Hotchkis

Hotchkis’ first links with Kirkcudbright go back to 1915, when she stayed in a studio rented from Jessie M. King in Greengate Close, which many years later would become her home.   At that time, Kirkcudbright was an artist colony whose inhabitants included E.A. Hornel, Charles Oppenheimer, E.A. Taylor, and King.  Hotchkis visited Kirkcudbright frequently over the next seven years, but left to go to the Far East in 1922 to visit her sister Catherine who was a missionary in Mukden (now Shenyang) in Manchuria.  She had an exhibition of  her paintings in Shanghai, and spent a year teaching art at Yenching University in Peking before returning to Scotland in 1924.  She returned to China, however, in 1926 and stayed until the Japanese invasion in 1937.  She must have known the etcher Thomas Handforth, because she took his photograph at some point during the early to mid-1930s when Handforth was in China.

Autumn in Galloway 

(linocut)

The Tolbooth at Night

(linocut)

Tolbooth, Kirkcudbright

(woodblock print)

Hotchkis first met the American painter Mary Mullikin at Beidaihe, a Chinese seaside resort, in July 1924, and the two became close friends.  After she returned to China, the pair traveled together to Japan and Korea in 1927.  In September 1931, she and Mullikin made their first trip to the Yungang caves near the city of Datong in northern Shanxi province.  They returned there the following June, having conceived the idea of writing a book about the cave sculptures of Yungang illustrated with their own paintings and drawings.  It was published in 1935 as “Buddhist Sculptures at the Yun Kang Caves.”

Buddha's Horse Kanthaka, Bids Farewell by Licking the Boot of Maitreya

(painting reproduced in The National Geographic Magazine, March 1938)

At the request of their publisher, the pair made a pilgrimage to the Nine Sacred Mountains of China in 1935 and 1936.  This resulted in another book illustrated by Hotchkis, although it was not published until thirty-seven years later.  China was under considerable turmoil  at the time, with revolutionary forces and brigands vying for control in some areas, so it was quite brave of them to travel to such remote parts under the circumstances.  Mullikin also wrote an article for the March 1938 issue of The National Geographic Magazine about “China’s Great Wall of Sculpture “ (Wu Tai Shan), which included reproductions of paintings and drawings by Mullikin and Hotchkis.

Anna Hotchkis (center) at Petra, Jordan (1938)

Upon hearing that the Japanese had entered Peking in 1937, Hotchkis decided to return to Scotland.  After spending six or seven months in India, she finally set up home in Kirkcudbright in 1938, where she would live and work for the rest of her life, although she continued to travel extensively in Europe and  North America and made two return trips to Hong Kong, at least one of which was in connection with the publication of her book “The Nine Sacred Mountains of China”  in 1973.

The Nine Sacred Mountains of China

(cover illustration)

Unfortunately, not much is known about Hotchkis’ woodblock and linocut career.  As shown above, she made at least three, relatively simplistic prints of scenes of Kirkcudbright that were probably done in the 1915-1922 time period.  In early 1926, she exhibited in Glasgow three woodblock prints of Chinese scenes: “The Street, Shanghai”; “The Needle Pagoda, China”; and “The Great Wall Of China.”  I haven’t been able to locate images of any of these prints.  However, she made at least two other Chinese woodblock prints: “Boats, Hong Kong,” and “Boats, Macao.”  Stylistically, her “Boats, Hong Kong” print is quite similar to elements of her oil painting “The Peak, Hong Kong by Night.” I’ve also found a lithograph she designed of the “Wei Dynasty Pagoda, Sung Shan.”

Boats, Hong Kong

Personal Collection

(woodblock print)

 

 The Peak, Hong Kong by Night (painting)

 

 Boats, Macao

Personal Collection

 (woodblock print)

Wei Dynasty Pagoda, Sung Shan

(lithograph)

 

The examples of Hotchkis' Chinese wooodblock prints are very different.  "Boats, Honk Kong" clearly did not employ a outline keyblock.  It is printed (with considerable rubbing) on soft, absorbent paper with what appears to be watercolor-based pigments.  "Boats, Maco," on the other hand, looks like it might have used a partial keyblock and it is printed on very thin tissue paper.  It's a matter of taste, but I prefer the former to the latter. 

 

Diamond Mountains, Korea 

(watercolor)

Image courtesy of Tom and Colleen Hotchkis

 

Young Chinese Monk

(watercolor)

Hotchkis' sister Isobel was also an artist, but it does not appear that she ever made any prints.

 

Street Kitchen, Peking by Isobel Hotchkis 

(watercolor)

Image courtesy of Tom and Colleen Hotchkis

 

Having spent more than a dozen years in China, Hotchkis’ output includes a large number of oil paintings, pastels, watercolors, and drawings of her time in China.  Many of the ones I have seen would have translated well to the woodblock print medium.  If anyone has any additional information about Hotchkis’ other Chinese woodblock prints, please let me know.

Anna Hotchkis in her nineties (c. 1980)

My thanks to the High St. Gallery in Kirkcudbright for certain biographical information and for some of the photographs and artwork images used in this entry.

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Paul Binnie’s New Tattoo Print

With rare exceptions, I usually don’t collect much post-WWII art.  While the shin hanga movement continued to exist after the war, few of the great print designers continued to be active and, of those that were, most of their best work was behind them.  A couple of decades later, the shin hanga movement was all but moribund, continuing to exist predominantly as a means to generate posthumous edition printings of old designs, or to reproduce ukiyo-e and shin hanga masterpieces on recarved blocks.  Moreover, as modern art principles took hold, the prints of sosaku hanga artists became less representational and more abstract, not to mention largely uninterested in depicting the types of subject matter that historically had been featured in ukiyo-e and shin hanga prints.  While contemporary non-representational art may have an appeal that spans cultures and borders, it largely leaves me cold.

Self-Portrait with Printer's Apron (1989)

Etching by Paul Binnie

Personal Collection

One major exception for me, however, is the work of the Scottish woodblock print artist Paul Binnie (1967- ), who currently lives in London, England.  I initially discovered Paul’s prints about 10 years ago and was blown away by several things.  First, there was the quality of the draftsmanship of Paul’s original preparatory drawings.  The woodblock print artists I’ve most admired have almost always been particularly talented in that area.   Second, I was impressed with how detailed and labor-intensive his prints were, usually requiring several dozen blocks and impressions, often lavishly printed with mica, metallic pigments, embossing, or other luxury printing effects, a result made all the more impressive by the fact that Paul does his own carving and printing.   His resulting prints of a quality that largely haven’t been seen since the Taisho and early Showa “golden age” of shin hanga prints issued by publishers such as Watanabe Shozaburo.  Finally, perhaps because Paul is himself a collector of ukiyo-e and shin hanga prints, he has great fondness for the types of subject matter of the prints produced under the traditional hanmoto system (as well as those produced by independent artists like Hiroshi Yoshida and Hashiguchi Goyo who hired their own carvers and printers to print their designs).  His work frequently pays homage to the great Japanese print artists of the past while nonetheless imbuing his own designs with a decidedly modern sensibility.  (It should be noted that Paul does, on occasion, carve freestyle on the woodblock and use a more limited color palette to produce prints more emblematic of the sosaku hanga movement.  He has even cut his blocks into segments with a jigsaw in order to produce prints in a manner somewhat analogous to the prints made by the Provincetown printmakers.)

Red Fuji - Mount Fuji from Lake Kawaguchi (2002)

In 1993, Binnie traveled to Japan to learn how to make woodblock prints.  Through a friend he learned of the woodblock print studio operated by Toshi Yoshida, Hiroshi Yoshida’s son, in Tokyo.  Toshi Yoshida was too ill to take on new students and one of his recommendations was for Binnie to apprentice himself with Seki Kenji, the head printer for the publisher Doi and someone who maintained his own carving and printing workshop in Western Tokyo.  Binnie studied for a year and half with Seki Kenji and remained in Japan until late 1998 producing prints and oil paintings of Kabuki and Noh actors.

 

 Bandō Tamasaburō as the Spirit of the Heron

in the play "The Heron Maiden" (1997)

Today, Binnie’s woodblock print output exceeds 150 designs.  His subjects include bijin (beautiful women), male nudes, landscapes (including North American and European locales), clouds, flowers, animals, and Japanese mythological scenes.  In my opinion, some of his most outstanding prints involve sensitive portraits of contemporary kabuki actors.  Indeed he is virtually only the active woodblock print artist keeping that particular genre alive today.  Another area in which he excels are his tattoo prints, another classic ukiyo-e subject but one largely ignored by artists of the shin hanga movement.  I never really liked or appreciated tattoo prints until I discovered Paul’s work, which brings us to the subject of this post.

New York Night (2008)

Courtesy of Scholten Japanese Art

In 2004, Binnie began work on an intermittent series of prints called Edozumi Hyaku Shoku (A Hundred Shades of Ink of Edo).  Binnie had made tattoo prints prior to 2004 but, with the exception of color variants, the designs were independent of each other and generally involved stylized tattoos.   In this new series, the unifying theme would be tattoo designs (or composite tattoo designs) drawn from the print imagery of famous ukiyo-e artists.   Thus, one print featured a man with a tattoo made up entirely of cats in homage to the noted cat fancier Utagawa Kuniyoshi, who frequently depicted cats in his prints.  Another print in the series cleverly incorporated scenes from various Hokusai prints of famous Japanese waterfalls into a tattoo on a man in a shower.   Other tattoo designs in the series featured motifs from the prints of Yoshitoshi, Kunisada, Sharaku, Utamaro, Eizan, Haranobu, and Kiyonaga, with half of the models being female.  For collectors who may not be interested in a tattoo print, Binnie also produces at least one non-tattoo version in an entirely different color scheme.

 Kuniyoshi's Cats (2004)

White Cat (2004)

Paul Binnie has just released the tenth and final design in the series, a print called Hiroshige no Edo (Hiroshige’s Edo).  Like all the tattoo prints in the series, it is issued in an edition of 100 and with a background printed with baren sujizuri (circular baren printing).  This particular print design employs 46 colors and required 43 separate block impressions to make.  The majority of the imagery in this print comes from various designs in Ando Hiroshige’s famous print series Edo Meishō Hyakei (One Hundred Famous Views of Edo) (1856-1858).

Hiroshige no Edo (2015)

The tattoo on the woman’s back derives from two separate Hiroshige prints, Ōhashi Atake no Yūdachi (Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake) and Fukagawa Susaki Jūmantsubo.  An admixture of the red-pink of the woman’s cloth has been added to the background printing in a manner so as to suggest heavy rain like the Ōhashi print.  The design on the woman’s sheer cloth comes from a third print in the series, Kameido Umeyashiki (The Plum Garden at Kameido).  The carp seal under Binnie’s signature printed in 23 carat gold leaf is an allusion to the Boy’s Day banner prominently featured in Hiroshige’s Koinobori Suidobashi Surugadai print, while the Fuji scene at the bottom of the cartouche is from an undated tanzaku print of snow on Nihonbashi.   Hiroshige would later feature some of the same compositional elements in a similar print in the Edo Meishō Hyakei series called Nihonbashiyukibara (Nihonbashi, Clearing After Snow). (Click on the links above to see the corresponding Hiroshige print.)  Note how the woman's head and left elbow intentionally break the margin of the print.

Binnie’s print is part of a long tradition of Western artists appropriating Japanese print motifs into their art, a practice that has been going from almost the moment that Japan was opened up to the West.  Van Gogh, for example, painted two famous copies of Hiroshige’s  Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake and The Plum Garden at Kameido.

Bridge In The Rain (1887) by Vincent van Gogh

 

  Flowering Plum Orchard (1887) by Vincent van Gogh

In addition to Hiroshige no Edo, Paul has released two non-tattoo variants of that design.   The first, also in an edition of 100, is called Adesugata (Alluring Figure), part of another series called Azuma Nishiki Bijin Awase (A Collection of Eastern Brocade Beauties).  It is printed against a shaded lilac and mauve-pink ground.  The woman’s sheer cloth is the green of Japanese tea, embellished with flower buds in silver metallic pigment and 23 carat gold leaf.  In addition, there is an extra black lacquer-printed block in the hair, and blind embossing in the signature in the lower margin.  It employs 55 colors and required 51 separate block impressions. 

Adesugata (2015)

The second, Hantōmei (Translucent), is a smaller edition of 30, and is available exclusively from the Saru Gallery in Uden, The Netherlands.  It features a sensual burgundy red background  and also features Binnie’s signature printed in 23 carat gold leaf.  It employs 43 colors and  required 41 separate block impressions, including three for the red background alone.   (Several other designs in Binnie’s tattoo series also were produced without tattoos in a small edition utilizing a similar red ground background.  These designs tend to sell out rather quickly, after which the prices for Binnie’s sold-out prints tend to skyrocket on the secondary market.)

 Hantōmei (2014)

Courtesy of Saru Gallery

For a print such as Hiroshige no Edo, Paul would typically draw from life a series of drawings of the model (sans the imagined tattoo), eventually resulting in a final conte drawing in the size of the intended print.  Based on this drawing, an ink drawing (hanshita-e) would be prepared for purposes of cutting the block.  Traditionally, such a drawing would be destroyed in the course of carving, but Paul uses a photocopy of the drawing so that the original ink drawing can be preserved.  The tattoo is itself the subject of a separate ink drawing overlay.

Conte Drawing #1

Personal Collection

Conte Drawing #2

Courtesy of Scholten Japanese Art

Conte Drawing #3

Personal Collection

Hanshita-e (ink drawing)

Personal Collection

Hirogshige no Edo tattoo overlay

Personal Collection

A number of dealers around the world handle Paul Binnie’s prints, but two of the best are Eric van den Ingat the Saru Gallery in Uden, The Netherlands and Katherine Martin at the Scholten Gallery in New York City.  Each carries Hiroshige no Edo and their websites feature a large number of other Binnie designs in inventory, which I recommend you check out to get a sense of the variety in Paul’s work.  For further reading, I suggest Paul Binnie: A Dialogue with the Past - The First 100 Japanese Prints (Eric van den Ing, ed., Art Media Resources 2007), which features full page images of all of Paul’s commercially produced woodblock and stencil prints as of its publication date.  It is available at Amazon.com and other venues.

 

November 10, 2021 Addendum:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquired a complete set of Paul Binnie's tattoo prints from A Hundred Shades of Ink of Edo series a few years ago.  They are currently on display until December 5th in the Met's Japanese Galleries, where they are paired with related ukiyo-e prints from the Met's collection.

Cover depicts "Butterfly Bow" (2005)

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Esther M. Crawford

Until last month, I had never heard of Esther Mabel Crawford (1872-1958).   But then I found this little woodblock print (4 3/8” x 6 ½") at Steven Thomas, Inc.’s website, which I immediately knew I had to add to my collection, and I began to scour the Internet to find out more about her career.

Old Canal, Kioto (c. 1908-1910)
Personal Collection

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Esther Crawford attended the Cincinnati Art Academy from 1894-1898 under Lewis H. Meakin, Thomas Noble, and Joseph H. Sharp.  In 1900, she studied at the Académie Carmen with James Whistler and Alphonse Mucha.  In 1901, she spent time at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she studied with Arthur Wesley Dow and Otto Walter Beck, and she also attended the South Kensington School of Design in London.  From 1904 to 1906, Crawford taught art at the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville, Illinois, and lectured on and off throughout the aughts at the University of Chicago.  She also studied with B.J.O. Nordfeldt in Chicago, an association that would have had to have taken place prior to Nordfeldt’s departure for Europe in 1908.

At some point between 1908 and 1910, Crawford traveled to Japan and China.  She appears to have returned to Chicago by January 1911, as she exhibited three oil paintings from her Asian trip at an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (January 31 - February 26, 1911).  Thirty-six of her Japanese landscapes were exhibited by the Dubuque Art Association in March 1911.  Then, at another exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (May 9, 1911 - June 7, 1911), Crawford exhibited two woodblock prints:  “Old Canal, Kioto” (believed to be the print shown above) and “Rothenberg.”

 Rothenberg

As Crawford’s Rothenberg print is not dated, one wonders in light of its subject matter whether it might have been executed prior to her residence in Illinois.  Crawford made at least one other woodblock print depicting a European landscape, “Old Venice,” that probably dates to the same time period as “Rothenberg.” 

 Old Venice

In the fall of 1911, Crawford took a position in the art department of the State Normal School in Los Angeles, California (now UCLA).  She once again exhibited “Old Canal, Kioto” in 1915 at a show held by The Print Makers of Los Angeles (later the Printmakers Society of California).  She also participated in the Southern California Panama Exposition in San Diego in 1915, winning a Bronze Medal -- although I have yet to determine exactly what paintings or prints she exhibited there or what piece won her a medal.  She became a member of the California Art Club and exhibited there on and off until over the course of the next twenty years.

By the end of the decade, Crawford had left the faculty of the State Normal School and she seems to have spent the following decade traveling and painting landscapes.  In addition to painting California landscapes, she also spent time in Arizona, New Mexico, and Hawaii.   Crawford returned to Japan in 1922, where she is reported to have studied, although I have no idea what she studied or under whom she received instruction.  She also made a return trip to China in 1929, which resulted in a number of oil paintings of Chinese landscapes.

In The Forbidden City (1929)

 

China (1929)

“Old Canal, Kioto” clearly shows Dow’s influence, both in style and in size.  Compare it, for example, with Dow’s “Gables by the Old Bridge” print, especially in the green-gray color palette.   (Having never seen two copies of any single Crawford print, I have no idea if she, like Dow, varied colors from print to print.)  She might have also been familiar with Nordfeldt’s 1906 print, “The Bridge,” although that is a far more mature work.  One can also see echoes of Dow’s “The Clam House” and “The Old Bridge” in her “Rothenberg” print.

Gables by the Old Bridge (c. 1893) by Arthur W. Dow

Crawford produced at least one other woodblock print as a result of her first trip to Japan, a piece known by the title “Cherry Trees.”  It is, in my opinion, her most interesting print by far, as she seems to be trying to crawl out from under Dow’s shadow and inject the scene with her own personal synthesis of Japanese aesthetics.  It appears to be her only print bearing a cartouche in the lower left corner that, while unclear, looks like a stylized version of her initials.  Her depiction of the trees and figures may well have been somewhat informed by Nordfeldt’s 1906 prints of “The Village Green, Twilight,” “The Tree,” and “Mist, The Anglers,” but that is certainly not a bad thing.

 Cherry Trees (c. 1908-1910)

If I had encountered Crawford’s “Cherry Trees” unsigned in a dealer’s bin, my immediate reaction would have been that it was an early work by some late Meiji or early Taisho era sosaku hanga artist like Tsuruta Goro.  (By way of comparison, Tsuruta’s 1917 print “Fishing” is shown below.)  “Cherry Trees” is simultaneously both modern and crude, romantic without being cloyingly sweet.  It obviously lacks the carving and printing finesse of the master artisans employed by the shin hanga publishing houses, but it is not without charm.  While her rather static “Old Canal, Kioto” print is devoid of figures, it is hard to imagine her “Cherry Trees” print without the inclusion of the two women in the park.

Fishing (1917) by Tsuruta Goro

Steven Thomas -- the source of the images of the four Crawford woodblock prints depicted above -- informs me that another woodblock print by Crawford exists of an unspecified mountain landscape.  It’s doubtful that she produced many more designs, so we can only wonder how she might have developed as a woodblock print artist if she had continued to work in that genre.  A tantalizing suggestion might be found in this 1940s silk screen print by Crawford called “Homeward Bound,” which reminds me of certain woodblock prints by William S. Rice and Frances Gearhart.  

 Homeward Bound (c. 1940s)

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Fritz Steinert

From 1904 until his retirement in 1930, Emil Orlik was the head of the department for graphic art and book illustration at the Academy of the Museum of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum) in Berlin. There he taught countless students over the years in the fundamentals of woodblock carving and printing, etching, and lithography, many of whom would became notable graphic artists in their own right.   However, unlike Orlik, few of his students ever travelled to the Far East and even fewer seem to have depicted Asian subject matter in their prints.   A notable exception, however, was the little-known German artist Fritz Steinert (1891-1981).

Self-Portrait (1968)

(oil painting)

I have only two Steinert woodblock prints in my collection (one acquired in 2017) and I knew virtually nothing about this artist beyond a couple of landscape paintings that I had seen come up for auction when I started to draft this post in 2015.  However, thanks to the efforts of the Austrian scholar Peter Pantzer, I recently learned about a memoir that Steinert published shortly before his death under the title “Zwishen Kunst und Kommiß.”  In the course of tracking a copy of that memoir down, I also found a small, undated monograph by E. Benner entitled “Fritz Steinert Bilder Zeichnungen.”  (All the black and white woodblock prints featured in this entry are from these two sources.)

Per Peter Pantzer, Steinert, at age 16, was accepted to the art school attached to the Museum of Applied Arts in 1907.   There he met Emil Orlik, who became a major influence on his early work, became exposed to Japanese prints, and developed an affection for the Far East.  At age 20, like other German young men at that time, Steinert had to complete compulsory military service.  He elected to join the Marine Corps and, in 1911, opted for deployment in the German colony Tsingtao in China.  (Orlik made his second trip to China in 1912, but I have not found any evidence that the two met up with each other there.)

 

 Kuli in Tsingtau (c. 1911-1913)
(woodblock print)

At least four woodblock prints by Steinert depicting Chinese scenes are known to exist, “Kuli in Tasingtau,” “[Man with Fan],” “Tsingtao,” and “Mandschoujunge.” The first two are  rather crude and undistinguished works, likely among the earliest of Steinert's woodblock prints.

 

[Man with Fan] (1913)

(colored woodblock print)

Courtesy of David Corfman

 

By the time Steinert made “Tsingtao,” the flat perspective of “[Man with Fan]” is replaced by a heighten graphic sensibility.  The figures have volume, the perspective has depth, and there is suggestion of movement as the Chinese family traverses the field.

 

Tsingtao (1913)
(colored woodblock print)

Courtesy of David Corfman

 

Steinert's best work during his time in Chines is probably his portrait of the Chinese boy.  It is surprisingly powerful, all the more so perhaps because of its economy of line, and reminiscent of Orlik’s color woodblock print portraits of a decade earlier.  Steinert appears to have adopted Orlik's convention of dating the print according to when it was sold or given away, rather than made.  Although my copy is dated 1970, a version dated 1913 is known to exist.

Mandschoujung (1913)
Personal Collection
(colored woodblock print)

After about two years in Tsingtao, Steinert’s compulsory service was up and he decided to sail to Japan in 1913 on a freighter called the “Daibutsu maru.”  The details of Steinert’s stay in Japan are sketchy.  He spent time in at least Kobe and Kyoto, where he went to visited temples, geisha houses, and theatres and saw hundreds of woodblock prints and paintings by important Japanese artists.  He made at least two woodblock prints while in Japan, though it is entirely possible that even his Chinese-themed prints were made there as well.  One, “Kyoto,” is a rather prosaic depiction of a Japanese torii, probably made shortly upon his arrival.

Kyoto (1913)
(woodblock print)

But Steinert’s other print is a surprise -- a multicolor woodblock bust portrait of a geisha seen from behind that is head and shoulders above his Torii print (no pun intended).

Japanerin (1913)
Personal Collection
(colored woodblock print)

My copy of the geisha print is inscribed “Japanerin” in pencil at the lower left of the sheet (not shown), and it was originally unclear to me if this title was written by Steinert or by a subsequent dealer or collector.   However, a copy in the collection of David Corfman bears the same title and date, suggesting that “Japanerin” is indeed the official title of this print.

 

Since Steinert was in Japan at the time, a natural question would be if he had any assistance in carving or printing this design, as Orlik did with his own woodblock prints made in Japan.  Given the small image size (14.8 cm x 10.3 cm), the color bleed outside the margin, some unprinted areas around the outline of the hair and collar, and break in the margin line in the upper left, I think we can safely assume that this print was entirely Steinert’s handiwork.  (The wildly uneven baren work on the Mandschoujung print also suggests that it was self-printed.)

Steinert’s memoir contains the following passage (which I have inartfully translated from the original German into English) that could very well be discussing the actual model for this print:  “In order to draw the extremely picturesque costume of the Japanese, I got through the mediation of my hoteliers a petite Geisha rented from a geisha house for 10 yen, who then stood patiently and modeled for me.  Noteworthy was the hairstyle of this Japanese woman which was very elaborately decorated with silver and heavy glossy paper jewelry and which took a long time to style. Since the Japanese woman has her head lying on a headrest at night, this structure is protected.”

Advertising Poster (1911) by Kitano Tsunetomi

Personal Collection

(chromolithograph)

Steinert’s decision to forgo depicting the woman’s face may have been partly a matter of expediency, but it nonetheless seems apparent that he wanted to focus the viewer’s attention on the woman’s hairstyle.   Readers should also know that the Japanese regarded a woman’s neck to be an erogenous zone, and that showing the geisha’s red undergarment peeking out through the collar of her kimono would be considered mildly titillating.  It is also possible that Steinert was inspired by similar perspectives of  Japanese women depicted by Japanese artists, such as in this contemporaneous crayon lithograph advertising poster designed in 1911 by one of my favorite Japanese artists, the Osaka bijin-ga painter and woodblock print designer Kitano Tsunetomi (1880-1947).

Japanese Mother and Child (c. 1913)

Personal Collection

(pencil drawing)

It is not exactly clear how long Steinert stayed in Japan -- probably until he ran out of money -- and it appears he returned to Germany via Russia by the end of 1913.  He briefly resumed his studies with Orlik in Berlin, studies that were soon to be interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.  Had he stayed in the Marine Corps in Tsingtao, he undoubtedly would have spent the duration of the war in a P.O.W. camp in Japan.  After the war, Steinert became an art teacher until he ran afoul of the Nazi regime and lost his position.  He also served in the Second World War, after which he moved to Bavaria, where he lived until the end of his life.  He appears to have continued to make expressionist black and white woodblock prints off and on throughout his career, and also he also dabbled in lithography.  Retirement, however, allowed him to concentrate on oil painting, especially portraits and plein air landscapes.

Spring Flowers in Glass Vase (1975)

Courtesy of Graves International Art

(watercolor)

Maria in Vietnam

Courtesy of Graves International Art

(woodblock print)

Selbstbildnis mit Tod (c. 1970s?)

Courtesy of Graves International Art

(woodblock print)

If any reader is aware of other woodblock prints by Steinert featuring Asian subject matter (or has any of the above black and white designs for sale), please let me know. 

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Emil Orlik and Japan -- New 2015 Exhibition

Beginning August 23rd and continuing until November 22, 2015, there will be an Orlik exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland called "Emil Orlik und Japan: Aus dem Land der aufgehenden Sonne (Emil Orlik and Japan: From the Land of the Rising Sun)."  The exhibition will present virtually all of Orlik's Japanese graphics (woodblock prints, etchings, and lithographs), plus a selection of his related notebook sketches and paintings.  This is the third major Orlik exhibition in Germany in as many years, following similar themed shows in Hamburg and Regensburg.

Hand-painted Postcard (1900) by Emil Orlik

Personal Collection

The exhibition in Schloss Moyland will be based primarily on the Orlik collection of Peter Voss-Andreae, as was the show in Hamburg in 2013.  However, it will include 23 pieces from my own Orlik collection, including preparatory drawings and paintings for some of Orlik's prints, some rare etchings, and a number of hand-illustrated postcards.  I've also loaned two woodblock prints and corresponding preparatory drawings by Toyohara Chikanobu (1838-1912) to illustrate the state of woodblock printing at the time of Orlik's first trip to Japan in 1900, plus a 1903 book print by Hashiguchi Goyo (1880-1921), believed to be the first instance of a Japanese artist employing the ex libris concept that Orlik introduced to the Japanese.

 Hand-painted Postcard (1900) by Emil Orlik

Personal Collection

"Dämmerung" (1901), oil on board by Emil Orlik
Personal Collection

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Introduction

As the title of this blog suggests, it is devoted to the topic of Western printmakers and the Orient.  The focus will be primarily on woodblock print designers and etchers who traveled to Japan, China, India and other parts of the Orient circa 1880-1940.  From time to time, however, I might also discuss the work of what I call "arrmchair Orientalists": Western printmakers who, although they never traveled to Asia, were nonetheless heavily influenced by Asian art (especially by Japanese woodblock prints) and/or employed Asian imagery in their work.  In the process, I hope to highlight the work of a number of lesser known or all-but-forgotten printmakers, and to generate on an ad hoc basis working checklists of their "eastern impressions."

The banner for this blog shows a woodblock print triptych designed by the Austrian artist Emil Orlik (1870-1932) during his first trip to Japan in 1900 that  illustrates the traditional Japanese hanmoto system of ukiyo-e woodblock print production.  This was a collaborative approach involving a division of labor between the artist (print designer), the carver, and the printer, all under the aegis of a publisher who would fund the operation and market the resulting prints.  Orlik traveled to Japan to learn firsthand the Japanese techniques of woodblock carving and printing.  It is nonetheless believed today that Orlik employed Japanese craftsmen in whole or in part to carve and print his designs while he was in Japan.  Orlik's triptych was also later published in Vienna in 1902 in lithographic form.

In the 20th Century, the so-called "shin hanga" (new print) movement continued to produce Japanese woodblock prints in the traditional manner while embracing realism and incorporating Western art conventions to depict subject matter with a modern sensibility.  At the same time, the traditional approach was being supplanted by artists of the "sōsaku hanga" (creative print) movement, who took on the responsibility of carving and printing (and usually selling)  their own prints (which tended to favor expressionistic or abstract subject matter).

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