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Background
Kawanishi Hide (川西英), 1894-1965, whose given name was Hideo, was born and worked in Kobe, an international port city that inspired much of his subject matter. He was employed as a postmaster, but his ancestors were merchants, particularly traders in several alcoholic spirits, sake (酒 or nihonshu 日本酒), mirin (味醂), and shôchû (焼酎), which they transported to Tokyo in their fleet of ships. Kawanishi's family opposed his becoming involved in painting and printmaking. A self-taught artist, Kawanishi started painting in oils, but turned to woodblock printmaking after seeing a print by Yamamoto Kanae (A small bay in Brittany) displayed in a shop window in Osaka. He was not interested in ukiyo-e, although Nagasaki-e naturally fascinated him, with its exotic ships and foreign traders. Gradually abandoning oils, Kawanishi fell under the influence of the Art Deco poster style of the 1920s and first exhibited prints in 1923 with the Nihon Sôsaku Hanga Kyôkai (Japan Creative Print Association 日本創作版画協会 founded 1918). Other influences were Takehisa Yumeji (竹久夢二), Onchi Kôshirô (恩地孝四郎), Yamamoto Kanae (山本鼎), and European artists such as Lautrec, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Leger, and Matisse.
Kawanishi used poster colors and sumi (Japanese carbon black, i.e., soot, water, and glue), cutting his blocks with a curved chisel to obtain soft edges. He used katsura or ho wood, and printed on hodomura paper. He produced a large number of single-sheet designs (possibly as many as 1,000), as well as printed albums and books, and sets or series. The latter included Shôwa bijin fûzoku jûnitai (Twelve customs of beauties from the Shôwa era), 1929; Kobe jûnigagetsu fûkei (Scenes of Kobe during the twelve months), 1931; and Hanga Kobe hyakkei (Prints of one hundred views of Kobe), 1935. Kawanishi was awarded the Hyôgo Prefecture Culture Prize (1949) and the Kobe Shinbun Peace Prize (1962). His son Kawanishi Yûzaburô (川西祐三郎 1923-2014) worked in his father's style, but with more international subjects. Yûzaburô also edited the catalogue raisonné of his father's prints (see ref. below).
For more about this artist, see Kawanishi Biography.
Design
The port city of Kobe is famous for sitting on a narrow ledge of land between the mountains and the sea. Throughout his career, Kawanishi depicted his beloved cosmopolitan hometown from every possible angle, but seldom as successfully as in this view looking down on it from its immediate hills. Here we see not only the busy piers, dry dock, and ships waiting to berth — Kobe was the preeminent port in Japan in this period — but also industrial commercial and government buildings, and most prominently, in the foreground, the houses and places of worship colored in lime-green and built for the huge and diverse foreign community. The steep roofs in red and blue are foreigners’ houses (ijinkan 異人館), a famous feature of Kobe. The large multi-gabled building to the right of all that is a government building, in French mansard style, again accenting the exoticness of Kobe.
This design is a beguiling blend of the representational and the abstract. Simplified buildings and windows are arranged rhythmically across the pictorial space. So, too, is the flotilla of commercial ships on the bay, whose fanciful renderings seem to lift the ships above the water, as if floating both on the sea and in the air above. Stylized clouds edge toward pure pattern or abstraction. As always, Kawanishi's palette of bright primary poster colors enlivens the scene.
References:
- D'Orlando, A., de Vries, M, Uhlenbeck, C. and Wessels, E.: Nostalgia and Modernity: The Styles of Komura Settai and Kawanishi Hide. Amsterdam: Nihin no Hanga, spring 2012. (exhibition cat.).
- Kawanishi Hide, Gashû "Kôbe hyakkei" Kawanishi Hide ga aishita fûkei (Collected pictures, "100 Scenes of Kobe," favorite scenes of Kawanishi Hide: 画集『神戸百景』川西英が愛した風景), 2008.
- Kawanishi Yûzaburô (川西祐三郎 ed.), Kawanishi Hide hanga shû (Collected prints of Kawanishi Hide, 川西英版画須). Tokyo: Masao Koga and Keishôsha Co., publisher: 1980, Vol. I, p. 151.
- Kobe City Koiso Memorial Museum of Art: (Kawanishi Hide, the retrospective. 120th anniversary of his birth (Kobe shiritsu Koiso kinen bijutsukan (神戸市立小磯記念美術館), Kawanishi hide kaiko ten — Seitan ichihyakunijû nen (川西回顧展 生誕120年). Kobe: 2014, no. 63-1, p. 62.
- Uhlenbeck, C., Newland, A.R., de Vries, M.: Waves of renewal: modern Japanese prints, 1900 to 1960, Selections from the Nihon no hanga collections, Amsterdam. Hotei Publishing, 2016, pp. 240-246.
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