designer of lettering, if that word may be stretched to include the complex ideographs used both in China and Japan.
Much as he revolted against it, his early environment must have been decisive in yet another respect, for his tastes were essentially aristocratic. He shunned Yamamoto's school for farmers and did not hesitate to express his displeasure with peasant art, an attitude that did not endear him to the powerful mingei group, which has sponsored the great revival of folk arts and crafts.
Onchi was deeply Japanese, but from the beginning of his career any overt Japanese influence on his work was negligible. He liked that considerable portion of Japanese art which is dominated by simplicity and elegance, but he never turned back to it for stimulation, and against ukiyoe he conducted full-scale rebellion. Elise Grilli, art critic of the Nippon Times, put it this way: "Onchi delighted in flaunting the conventions of ukiyoe prints. The meticulous craftsmanship, the virtuosity of line, the hair-raisingly painstaking printing from twenty or thirty separate blocks, the finicky precision in overlapping the colors, and, in recent times, the overwhelming cleverness in naturalistic representation—all this he threw out the window with a single toss and a hearty laugh. Now he could breathe again, freed from the claptrap of academic accretions."
Though he never went to Europe—his only trips outside Japan were to Formosa and later, in 1939, as an army artist to China—he was consistently oriented to the European rather than the Japanese, to the new rather than the old. This orientation is obviously reflected in his abstract work. In deference to realists like Yamamoto he made realistic prints for exhibition until World War II loosened his inhibitions, but abstract art had always been his paramount interest, and during the last ten or fifteen years of his life his output was almost entirely abstract. It was in these later years that he wrote: "Abstract art is now, as it should be, the main way of art, and I hope that our civilization soon comes to realize this. My work falls short of my expectations, short of what I want it to be, but I keep it up as one pioneer doing his part to cultivate this vast land. If my work happens to be poor, the fault is mine alone and not that of the method."
To Onchi hanga was not only a great medium but one uniquely suited to abstract art. He stressed this in his book, The Modern Hanga of Japan:
"Among the mediums of hanga the one most removed from the brush painting is the woodcut. A woodcut is best when the chisel in the wood is used most naturally. The virtue of hanga lies in the certainty that it comes from a creative process which permits no sham. Unlike brush painting, it allows no wavering of the hand. It is honest—sham and errors show. Some liberty may be allowed in the registry but so little that it, like the carving, is a process which permits no delusion... hanga rejects the accidental and rejects ornamentation... and it contains the most constructive process in graphic art, the advantage of superimposing pictures. For this reason hanga is probably the most suitable method yet found for the expression of modern art, which lays stress on construction."
His emphasis on abstract art gave rise to one misunderstanding, a common belief that he did not regard the ability to draw as important to the hanga artist. Onchi could draw with mastery. "Of course," he said, "one must be able to draw and sketch to make realistic prints. For abstracts, on the other hand, the important thing is composition and construction."
It was chiefly in his abstract prints that Onchi pioneered new techniques and probed the use of new materials. A print must be made with a block, to be sure, but this definition does not prescribe how the block is to be made. For his printing blocks Onchi used paper, cardboard, string, a rubber heel, charcoal, textiles, the fins of a fish, leaves—anything that came to hand and caught his lively imagination. He sometimes laughed at his own improvisations and accused himself of cheating, but this free use of materials remains one of his greatest contributions.
Michener has lighted up the whole creative-print movement with his story of how Onchi made one of the greatest of the modern prints, the brilliant portrait of his friend the poet Sakutaro Hagiwara (print 10). However, a look at how he made the lovely Poem Number 22: Leaf and Clouds (print 14) shows him at work on a more typical (because non-realistic) print and illustrates his innovations in technique and materials.
Onchi started with a pencil sketch of his basic design. The sketch, same size as the finished print, was a composition based on four different forms and a natural leaf. Having finished his design, he cut the four forms from waxed paper which he had carefully saved from the wrapping around cigarette cartons (Onchi was an inveterate saver, couldn't bear to throw anything away). The accompanying diagram shows these forms in proportionate size and numbered in the order in which he printed with them.
His fifth "block" was a natural leaf from a yuzuriha tree. These glossy leaves are often used with oranges and white paper to decorate doorways at New Year's time, and when this attractively worm-eaten specimen had appeared some prior New Year, Onchi had spotted it and added it to his hoard. In order to print from it he glued it to a thin board only a little larger than the leaf.
When he was ready to print, Onchi placed his sketch underneath a piece of clear glass so that the design showed through to give him a "map." Taking waxed-paper form number 1, he brushed ink on it, putting most of the ink close to the edge of the paper. For his ink he used regular sumi, adding a little vegetable mucilage called nori. He placed the paper form on the glass, matching its position with the design beneath and with the inked side down against the glass. Then he took the paper which he wanted to print and laid it on the glass over the waxed-paper form. Since he had no Kento, to position his paper he matched the corners with those of the sketch beneath. Finally he took his baren and rubbed the back of his paper just as though he were printing from a wood block. The ink, pressed between the glass and the impermeable waxed-paper form, oozed out around the edges of the form, and as it did so it printed on the paper above. Because Onchi printed on a fairly hard-surfaced, non-absorbent paper called Kyokushi, the pattern of the irregular ooze was in some places quite wide.
That much done, Onchi removed the waxed-paper form, wiped the glass clean, applied some more ink to the same form, placed it about an inch lower than he had the first time, and repeated the process.
Then he used form number 2 in the same manner, printing with it in three different positions. Form number 3 he used once, and with it he introduced his only color other than black, a golden tan in a water-color paint. Form number 4, the small triangle, was printed three times with ink much blacker than that used on the bigger forms.
Last of all came the leaf, mounted on its small board. Onchi removed the glass because the board might skid on it, and positioned this block directly on the design, leaf up. Jet-black ink was brushed on the leaf, and then he placed his paper down on top of it as though it were a wood block, again matching corners with the sketch in lieu of a Kento and printing with his baren in normal fashion.
If the finished print passed his critical inspection, Onchi stamped his name (here spelled Onzi—he made no virtue of consistency in spelling his own name in Roman letters) in the lower right corner (it can be seen in the reproduction just under the stem), and the work was complete. It is safe to say that it had been work undertaken in joy, carried through with exuberance, and finished swiftly. He tried to finish a job before the fun went out of it. "I have a good life," he liked to say, "and I want that to show in my work."
Over a period of a year and a half Onchi made ten copies of this print, and then, although he saved the handsome leaf, he destroyed his paper blocks. This was a large edition for him, because when he had made one print that satisfied him the act of creation was complete, and much as it might exasperate those who tried to collect his prints, he usually felt an overpowering urge to drop the matter there.
In speaking
