one cannot actually go to school and take a few courses to learn how to be an art dealer. On-the-job training seems to be the only road to knowledge in this area. But our very strong interest and heavy private involvement provided an inestimable background and a certain amount of preparation for our new career.
Being young and idealistic, we were also quite ignorant in not realizing what it would be like to start a business from zero with 1) no business experience, 2) insufficient capital, and 3) no known clients. What we did have in our favor was unquenchable enthusiasm and a deep and total sense of adventure to spur us on, along with two small daughters who enjoyed their three square meals a day. As they say nowadays, it's the bottom line that counts. After the usual amount of trial and error and occasional success, with a certain amount of good luck usually measurable in direct proportion to the hard work entailed, we eventually managed to evolve a formula of doing business that has enabled us to have a life filled with encounters with artists, with the prints we love, and with our clients, who obviously enjoy our enthusiasm for this aspect of Japanese culture. But hard work it was, harder than we thought we were capable of—even more arduous than the years we had spent learning to speak, read, and write Japanese.
Japanese etiquette requires that people apologize in advance for situations and circumstances in which Westerners would not necessarily feel a need. Having lived here for a long time, we know that we must extend our expressions of regret to the many outstanding artists whom we could not include in this book.
As we have mentioned, writing a personal book means having the prerogative to draw on specific prints and on particular contacts with certain people. Naturally we have chosen the ones we know and like best but at the same time feel that they present a very good picture of the print world from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, as witnessed by us during the two separate phases of our encounter, first as collectors and later as dealers. We hope that readers will begin to learn about and to recognize the works of the various artists and will come to enjoy and understand to some extent the breadth and depth of the contemporary Japanese print world.
Since this is not intended to be a scholarly work, we hope readers will approach it with the idea of enjoying our experiences as we have lived them, and perhaps finding relevance in their own quests as collectors.
Introduction
Historical Background
It does not seem fair to hurl an interested reader directly into the twentieth-century world of contemporary Japanese prints without providing a few historical signposts along the way. The complex journey of Japanese prints from "then" to "now" extends back at least to the eighth century, and we would like briefly to mention some of the crossroads.
The importation of Buddhism to Japan from China through Korea in the sixth century created the necessity for devotional images. The missionaries brought, along with their philosophy, the art of woodblock printing. Circa A. D. 765 Japan's Empress Shotoku, who was an avid follower of the new religion, decided that everyone else should be too. She ordered millions of sutras, amulets, images, and prayers to be printed for dissemination among the temples and the populace. The new religion (unlike the indigenous Shinto religion, which had little iconography) required representational art to portray its extensive pantheon. This art had to be quickly produced in multiple copies, and for that purpose the woodblock medium was well suited. During the following centuries woodblock prints associated with Buddhism were produced with an ever-increasing degree of technical expertise.
In the late fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels came to Japan, introducing Christianity as well as the art of copperplate etching and other Occidental methods of drawing and printing. However, due to the strict ban on Christianity officially imposed by the shogunate in 1637, the learning of these techniques was discouraged because of their foreign and religious associations.
Until the middle of the seventeenth century, fine art, especially painting, had been the province of the elite classes—samurai, nobility, and priests. After Tokugawa Ieyasu set up the shogunate in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1603, a new class began to arise—merchants and townsmen—with its own demands for popular mass art. Woodblock prints began to be churned out as book illustrations, as broadsheets and advertisements, as albums of erotica and novels, as wall decorations and souvenirs of travels, and as simple scenes depicting contemporary manners and customs.
The heyday of this genre occurred from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the prints are known as ukiyo-e (Japan's antique woodblock prints, literally pictures of the fleeting world). Japan was still an isolated country much turned in upon itself, but the class of society that had recently come to the fore created a demand for mass-produced art. Ukiyo-e were definitely a product of the rapid social changes occurring among newly affluent city dwellers.
These woodblock prints of colorfully bedecked courtesans, flamboyantly dramatic Kabuki actors, and dramatically presented landscapes (especially those of Hiroshige and Hokusai) have been Japan's cultural ambassadors for decades. Even as recently as twenty years ago, when the Japanese government or the Cultural Affairs Agency was asked to mount a show of Japanese prints overseas, it invariably trotted out ukiyo-e as representatives of Japanese print art. Frankly these works, no matter how lovely one may consider them, have been the bane of our existence as dealers in contemporary Japanese prints. Not only have they convinced Western minds that coy geisha and grimacing actors are the symbols of Japan, but they have also come to be regarded everywhere as the sole representatives of Japan as "the land of the woodblock print." In the meantime, Japanese artists have moved far ahead, anticipating the twenty-first century, and these old cultural icons are no longer fitting to represent the Japanese print world. It is true, of course, that Japan has long been renowned for its artists' expertise in woodblock printing, but not to the exclusion of the multitudinous other techniques currently being used in the print world.
We will make the point numerous times, but this might as well be the first mention: the Japanese excel at what they choose to do. They have borrowed many things from other cultures, both Asian and Western, perfecting them and making them their own. Everything is grist for the collective national mind in every field of endeavor, and art is no exception.
The ukiyo-e print, in particular, which has made a worldwide impression, was the product of several people: an artist, a carver, a printer, and a publisher. The collaboration worked well. The artist provided the design (quite often suggested by the publisher, who was usually not only educated but also astute as to what would please the public); the carver pasted the design on the block and did the appropriate carving; the printer pulled the proofs; the publisher handled distribution. Ukiyo-e were extremely popular with the general Japanese public, but the formal art establishment regarded them simply as multiply reproduced pictures for the mass market and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. The editions were not numbered and even today it is guesswork to decide exactly how many were made originally.
With the diplomatic opening of Japan to the outside world in 1853 (with the famous "black ships" of Commodore Perry setting the tone) communication began to flow in two directions. Western painting and printing techniques, perspective, and color were of great interest to the heretofore isolated Japanese artist, while the charming and exotic ukiyo-e crossed the seas to become a hit in Europe, influencing such important Impressionist artists as Whistler, Degas, Cassatt, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec. (It is interesting to note that many Japanese who traveled abroad in the twentieth century were immediately attracted to these European artists, probably because the strong line and perspective they were using reminded them of their own tradition.)
In North America in the early days of the twentieth century, three Americans were fundamentally responsible for the fact that today the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has more than 100,000 ukiyo-e among its holdings. Ernest Fenollosa, a native of Massachusetts and a teacher at Tokyo Imperial University, began to collect in great numbers in 1888. He encouraged his friend Dr. William Bigelow, a Boston surgeon,
