Kanae Yamamoto (, Yamamoto Kanae , 24 October 1882 – 8 October 1946) was a Japanese artist, known primarily for his prints and Western-style paintings. He is credited with originating the ("creative prints") movement, which aimed at self-expressive printmaking, in contrast to the commercial studio systems of ukiyo-e and . He initiated movements in folk arts and children's art education that continue to be influential in Japan.
Kanae trained as a wood engraver in the Western style before studying Western-style painting. While at art school he executed a two-colour print of a fisherman he had sketched on a trip to Chiba. Its publication ignited an interest in the expressive potential of prints that developed into the movement. Kanae spent 1912 to 1916 in Europe and brought ideas back to Japan gleaned from exhibitions of peasant crafts and children's art in Russia. In the late 1910s he founded movements that promoted creative peasant crafts and children's art education; the latter quickly gained adherents but was suppressed under Japan's growing militarism. These ideas experienced a revival after World War II.
Though always a supporter, Kanae left behind printmaking in the 1920s and devoted his artistic output to painting until he suffered a stroke in 1942. He spent his remaining years in mountainous Nagano in the city of Ueda, where the Kanae Yamamoto Memorial Museum was erected in 1962.
Life and career
Early life and training (1882–1907)
Kanae Yamamoto descended from the of hatamoto—samurai in the direct service of the Tokugawa shogunate of feudal Japan in Edo (modern Tokyo). His grandfather died 1868 in the Battle of Ueno, during the Boshin War which led to the fall of the Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration which returned power to the Emperor. This orphaned Kanae's father Ichirō, and thereafter he grew up in Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture; how he got there is a matter of speculation. The specialist in Chinese medicine, Ryōsai Yamamoto, from line of specialists in traditional Chinese medicine, took in Ichirō with the intention of raising him to marry his daughter Take, the eldest of the family's nine children.
Kanae was born 24 October 1882 in the 1-chōme neighbourhood of Okazaki. Ryōsai intended Ichirō to continue the family profession, but when the Meiji government announced it would grant medical licenses only to those who practised Western medicine, Ichirō moved to Tokyo to study it shortly after Kanae's birth. He lodged in the household of Mori Ōgai's father, where he performed household duties to earn his keep. At one point, to advance his studies, he took part in the clandestine act of digging up fresh graves to find bodies for dissection.
When he was five, Kanae and his mother joined Ichirō in Tokyo and settled in a tenement house in the San'ya area. His mother did sewing work to help support the family, and with her sister Tama provided maid service to the Mori household, and thus Kanae often met his younger cousin, Murayama Kaita, who, like Kanae, was to make a career in art. The painter Harada Naojirō, whom Ōgai had befriended when the two were studying in Germany, asked Kanae's mother, whom he had seen at the Mori household, to model for the painting Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon of 1890. Such occurrences may have contributed to attracting Kanae to art.
Ichirō raised his son under the influence of the liberal educational principles of Nakae Chōmin. Ichirō was responsible for the welfare of five of his wife's siblings, and so at age 11, after four years of primary school, the family finances did not permit Kanae's schooling to continue. He became an apprentice wood engraver and mastered Western techniques of tonal gradation in the workshop of Sakurai Torakichi in Shiba. His training focused on book and newspaper illustration, and included letterpress printing and photoengraving. His skill developed quickly and soon won praise from those he worked with. During this time printing technology underwent rapid change, brought to the forefront by the First Sino-Japanese War, which was reported in a variety of media, from paintings and woodblock prints to photographs. Kanae completed his apprenticeship at 18, followed by an obligatory year of service with Sakurai. By 1896, Ichirō had earned his medical license and set up a practice in (now part of Ueda), a village in Nagano Prefecture.
The rapid change in printing technology led Kanae to doubt his future prospects in wood engraving. He aspired to become a painter but knew his yet-indebted father was not in a position to pay for art school. He secretly enrolled at the in 1902, where he studied yōga Western-style painting. His instructors there included , , and Kuroda Seiki.
To pay for school, Kanae worked odd printing jobs for employers such as the Hochi Shimbun newspaper, and from February 1903 lodged at the home of his friend Ishii Hakutei, the eldest son of the artist . Kanae and the other aspiring artists lodged there talked into the night about art and hired a model for life drawing once a month.
Prints and sōsaku hanga (1904–1911)
Kanae joined a group of friends in July 1904 on a trip to Chōshi in Chiba Prefecture, where they stayed near the mouth of the Tone River. There he made a sketch of a fisherman dressed in ceremonial clothing overlooking a harbour. When he returned, he used the sketch as the basis of a wood engraving. He engraved on both sides of a single piece of wood: the one side he printed in ochre, which filled in all the spaces except the towel on the fisherman's head; the other he printed in black, which provided outlines and details. At the time, the art establishment saw woodblock printing as a commercial venture beneath the station of an aspiring fine artist.
Hakutei noticed the print and had it published in the July issue of the literary magazine Myōjō. In a column in the issue Ishii promoted the print as revolutionary, as it had been done as a means of painterly spontaneous self-expression, and used methods Ishii associated with ukiyo-e traditions. Soon the style Ishii dubbed became a popular topic within Myōjō circles. This was to grow into the ("creative prints") movement.
In summer 1905 Kanae visited his parents in Nagano, where he produced the oil painting Mosquito Net, the earliest of his oil paintings to be made public. That September Kanae, Hakutei and Ishii Tsuzurō, and some other friends founded the short-lived magazine Heitan in which they published a number of their prints. It was in Heitan that the word first appeared. The word was used interchangeably with until the magazine came to an end in April 1906; thereafter fell out of use and went on to become the modern Japanese word for prints in general.
Kanae learned in 1906 of the financial strain his parents still faced with their continuing responsibility for his mother's siblings. He moved out of the Ishiis' home on 8 March 1906 and rented a residence in Morikawa-chō in of Tokyo determined to pursue financial independence. He graduated on 2 April 1906 from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and in his graduation yearbook declared the French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes his favourite artist. He took work at Rakuten Kitazawa's Tokyo Puck, a cartoon humour magazine patterned after the American Puck.
Kanae felt disappointed at hand-printing's gradual loss of prestige in Japan; to revive interest he wrote a four-part series of articles in 1907 for the art magazine Mizu-e examining a wide variety of printing media and techniques. Kanae, Hakutei, and a former art-school classmate of Kanae's, Morita Tsunetomo, founded the monthly magazine Hōsun. whose first issue appeared 15 May 1907. It was patterned on such European magazines as Cocorico, Jugend, Simplicissimus. The contents were primarily literature, criticism, and art cartoons, and its publishers paid fine attention to details of graphic design. They printed the magazine on fine paper at an unusually large size and mixed colour reproduction with black-and-white. Kanae's contributions included his own prints, haiku poetry, and the carving of printing blocks for the designs of others. Kanae's former engraving teacher Sakurai Torakichi furnished the photographic printing plates. The first issue was eight pages and included a supplementary print of Shiba Park by Kanae. The young artists distributed the issue themselves to bookstores. It sold well, and the circle of contributors grew, as did the page count, which expanded to sixteen.
Tokyo during the Meiji period (1868–1912) had a great openness to foreign—especially European—influence, and Western trends in art were quickly replacing traditional Japanese ones until word spread of the impact exported ukiyo-e had had on art in the West. Artists who had all but abandoned the culture of the Edo period began to reconsider it and mix elements of it with Western approaches. Kanae took part in meetings of the Pan no Kai group of writers and artists whose goal was to replicate the atmosphere of Parisian cafés such as Café Guerbois of the Impressionists. At one of these rowdy bohemian meetings, a drunken Kanae fell through a window and landed in the garden below, wrapped in a paper screen; he returned to the gathering as if nothing had happened. The police kept watch over these meetings whose members they suspected of having socialist sympathies and held grudges over caricatures some of the members had published. Pan no Kai waned and came to and end in 1911.
Kanae wanted to revive the spirit of Edo-period ukiyo-e in his prints, and to this end in 1911 he founded the Tokyo Print Club to produce and distribute such prints. He advertised for members in Hōsun, but after the magazine's demise most of the associated artists left Tokyo and the only member he could recruit was Hanjirō Sakamoto. The pair began a series titled Sōga-butai sugata ("Stage Figure Sketches") of portraits of kabuki actors in the vein of the genre of ukiyo-e. The subjects were sketched from performances at the just-built Imperial Theatre and were captioned in French on the front and on the back in Japanese. Though Kanae had announced that prints were to come from thirty-four theatre pieces only three sets of four prints—two by each artist in each set—appeared in June, July, and September that year. The work represents a major turning point in his career as he turned away from the Western techniques that had defined his work toward a more Japanese approach such as the use of flat areas of colour. The prints failed to sell at first but began to find buyers only after he had left for France the following year. As Kanae was away the printer was not able to issue a second printing to meet the demand.
Kanae had come to neglect Hōsun as he devoted himself to Sōga-butai sugata. Hakutei and Tsunetomo had left Tokyo, and that July the magazine came to an end after thirty-five issues.
Europe (1912–1916)
Kanae had wanted to marry Mitsu Ishii, but her family forbade it—especially her mother and brother Hakutei. This rejection embittered him and he broke his friendship with Hakutei, though he remained friends with Tsuruzō. Kanae wished to study painting in Paris, so his father organized the distribution and sale of his son's work to raise funds for it while he was away. He set off on the Tango Maru from Kobe on 6 July 1912, and fifty-three days later landed in Marseilles. While on board he made what was likely the first of the prints he father was to sell for him by subscription: titled Wild Chickens, it depicted three Chinese prostitutes with bound feet inspired by prostitutes he saw when he passed through Shanghai. He printed it in Paris, where in his first few months he studied etching at the École des Beaux-Arts.