Master of print

Kuniyoshi
From the Arthur R. Miller Collection
Royal Academy, until 7 June
Sponsored by Canon

The Royal Academy is making something of a reputation for staging exhibitions of Japanese printmakers: the current Kuniyoshi show follows on neatly from Hokusai (1991–2) and Hiroshige (1997) and adds considerably to our understanding of the genre. There hasn’t been a major Kuniyoshi show in England for nearly 50 years, and he is certainly one of the less well-known of the great Japanese print artists. Master of an unexpected versatility and variety of subject, Kuniyoshi was also possessed of an originality that stands out even among such talented contemporaries.

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The son of a textile dyer and largely self-taught, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) was one of the last great artists of the Edo period in Japan, when the country was governed in the name of the emperor by a censorious military dictatorship. Samurai warriors were a fact of life and Kuniyoshi cornered a market with action-packed warrior prints and illustrations to tales of Chinese brigands from the classic adventure story, ‘The Water Margin’. In this culture of heroes, his powerful and imaginative designs found great favour. Thankfully he was not content simply to churn out images of derring-do, and experimented successfully with other subjects. Among these were landscape, beauties, the theatre and comic cuts. Cuts literally, because the technique of woodblock printing involved the cutting out from cherry wood of his designs, originally drawn on paper with brush and ink.

The process is quite complex, involving a ‘key’ block printed first in black, followed by a separate block for each extra colour (usually five). The size of the blocks was determined by the width of a cherry tree trunk, which resulted in the frequent use of diptychs or triptychs to achieve a more panoramic spread of image.