ART
Tim great century of the Japanese colour print, once used so lightly for packing purposes in trade with the West, surely represents the highest peak of graceful suavity ever sustained by a popular art. The painters of the Ukiyoye (or style of the Passing Hour) were anti-heroic, against the academic tradition of the noble subject ; Constable, Rowlandson, Courbet, Klee, Low are called to mind by their irreverent energy and sophisticated finesse. The last great figure of the Ukiyoye was Hiroshige (1797-1858), and Mr. Tikotin's collection of his drawings and prints, presented by the Arts Council at the New Burlington Galleries, must represent the widest range of his talent ever seen in this country.
I can imagine that many, like myself, will approach this exhibition expecting it to hold no surprises. They will be wrong. The living, pulsing quality of these superb prints is lost in inferior pulls of further reproduction. The infinite subtlety of the horizon beyond the Rapid of Awa no Naruto tNo. 3), the grain of the plank, the " blind blocking" of the feathers in neck and tail of the crane in No. 32—these must be sensed direct.
Such prints were the product of a team—the publisher, the designer, the engraver, the printer. As an example of Hiroshige's debt to his engravers, note the formula for overlapping trees in the drawing for No. 33, and then the cutting of the actual blocks. As an example of his debt to his printers—and more perhaps than any other he knew just how much he could depend upon them for the exact placing of a cloun or a gradation—note the sets of duplicate prints (which include Ohashi in a Summer Shower beloved of Van Gogh) and pre-eminently the astonishing transformation effected in Fireworks over the Bridge of Ryogoku.
The exhibition contains a number of less familiar aspects of Hiroshige's work. The delightful oyster-pink foxes in the gloaming _- of New Year's Day (No. 19) are there, but none of the Tokaido views. There are two of the triptychs, a number of designs for fans, examples of envelopes and letter paper, and some exquisite drawings (No. 34 Temple in the Mist is a miracle of suggestion by free brush-work, as are the drawings of the Provinces, Nos. 35-41).
Artists of the Ukiyoye have been esteemed less highly in Japan than their classical confreres. Let us admit that Hiroshige's love for the novelty of ultramarine, and his less careful supervision of the printing of his later designs, led on occasions to crudities. His output of prints, however, is said to have amounted to no fewer than 5,500, and in most of them his reverence for the whole cycle of nature, rain, mist, snow, summer night, birds and beasts and living things, affect the mind with eloquent severity. Again and again, irresistably, the eye is led past the busy figures, over the bridge, out along the promontory, over the many islets, to the horizon and implicatipns
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