Sochu Maekawa no ame: Rain at Maekawa, Sochu.

Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) was probably the greatest single artist of Japan's shin-hanga ('modern print') movement of the early to mid 20th century. The British Museum website states: ‘he has now become recognised as Japan’s best print landscapist since Hiroshige’. A relatively late entrant into art, he was was initially compelled to work for the family rope and thread wholesale business. However, he approached Kiyokata Kaburagi to teach him, who initially rejected him and persuaded him to study western-style painting which he did for two years. He then reapplied as Kaburagi’s student, who this time accepted him. In 1917 he was attracted to an exhibition by Shinsui Ito (Eight Views of Omi), and then approached the great shin-hanga publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō who got him to make three experimental prints. The rest is history: Hasui designed more than 600 woodblock prints in only 40 years, some printed in editions of up to 3000 impressions and enjoyed commercial success in Japan and internationally.

Hasui's atmospheric fukeiga ('pictures of landscapes') achieved international popularity. His poignant view of a figure walking at night in pouring rain was one of his own favourite works. In Hasui's own words, 'I love quiet scenes with the shadow of loneliness hanging over them'.  He emphasised that sense of solitude by manipulating relations of scale and pictorial depth, and through the subtle bokashi modulations of light and colour he had learned through his study of the kösen-ga, 'light pictures', of another of his teachers, Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915).

The lyrical sense of loneliness of Hasui's works is enhanced by his depiction of nostalgic subjects in rural settings, often represented at night, dawn or sunset. Underpinning these qualities are five conceptual foundations: a belief in the inspirational potential of nature; an appreciation of the power of atmospheric effects to suggest ephemerality; the importance of poetic moods of 'tranquillity or contemplation'; the source of a Japanese sense of identity in values and sensibilities of the past; and the capacity of 'beauty', especially that of nature, for 'expressing aesthetic, social, philosophical and even spiritual beliefs'.

Sources:

David Bell, 'A new vision: modern Japanese prints from the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 31 (2020), forthcoming.

David Bell and Mark Stocker, 'Rising sun at Te Papa: the Heriot collection of Japanese Art, Tuhinga, 29 (2018), https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/document/10608

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   May 2019