Beyond the Cherry Blossom

You can go to any number of exhibitions of late 19th-century Western artists -- Whistler, van Gogh, Vuillard to name just three -- and see how their work was significantly influenced by Japanese prints, which presented a radically different way of looking at things from a country that had just opened up to the outside world. But don't imagine that the traffic was only one-way. 

Japanese artists came West, and you can see some of the results of the fusion in Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London.  

The story starts in 1900, when Hiroshi Yoshida and a fellow Japanese artist were in London during a lengthy tour of America and Europe. The first time they attempted to visit the Dulwich gallery, on May 24, a policeman told them it didn't exist. They finally made it at their third attempt five days later, though Hiroshi had to leave his camera at the entrance, and their names are recorded in the visitor's book on display at the beginning of this show. 

Hiroshi, who initially specialised in Western-style painting, went on to become one of the dominant figures in the shin hanga (new print) movement, which combined traditional Japanese techniques, the kind you'd associate with Hokusai and Hiroshige, with Western artistic styles. So in the first room of this show, the one devoted to him, you get a range of expected Japanese views, but interpreted in a cross-cultural manner -- scenes of shrines and bridges in Tokyo, the unmistakable shape of Mount Fuji, the fortifications of Himeji Castle. Oh, and the cherry blossom.

And even though it depicts a motif that's so Japanese, this picture brought to mind a Western equivalent, Caspar David Friedrich's Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon.

As a video half-way through this show demonstrates, the creation of Hiroshi's images, with their gradations of colour, multiple tones and light effects, was extremely complex. "Hiroshi's prints had no simple parts," master printer Shinkichi Numabe tells us. One Tokyo night scene captures a rainy street, the lights inside a shop reflected on a display of fruit and vegetables outside, and most notably on the rivulets of water on the road surface. Rapid presents a view of a teeming, tumbling waterfall, the water brilliantly depicted in a huge range of blues, greens, whites and greys. It has to be seen close up to fully appreciate the detail and intricacy of the design. 

However, it's the images Hiroshi made on his extensive foreign travels that really catch the eye. There's a strange other-worldliness to some of them, such as his depictions of the Acropolis and the Sphinx in both daytime and nighttime versions. And what to make of his Canal in Venice? Not Canaletto, certainly. Perhaps just a hint of Chinese painting, with another Grand Canal involved. 

And Hiroshi's Matterhorn seems to provide another perspective too. It's the same mountain as the one they used to have on the Toblerone packaging. Except it isn't, quite, in his hands. We've never seen it this way before. 

Hiroshi was good at mountains. This is El Capitan in the Yosemite National Park, and it's virtually the first picture you see when you enter the exhibition. It was also part of the first series of prints -- of views of the US -- that he made after establishing his own studio in Tokyo in 1925.  

In the second room, we get to look at the work of Hiroshi's wife Fujio, and you're a bit shocked to find something completely unexpected and stunning -- a series of prints based on paintings of close-up views of flowers that recall Georgia O'Keeffe.

She got the effect by putting the flower heads in fish bowls to magnify the details.

Their elder son Tōshi initially followed in his father's footsteps, and his views of Tokyo include many similar effects. But then later, after World War II and as Tōshi also travelled extensively, things take a turn toward the abstract. At first you look at this print, entitled Bruges, and wonder what is going on. 

Gradually, the lines of green running down the image turn from drips into willow branches and the splodges of white that look like curling irons at the bottom materialise as ducks, or perhaps swans, on one of the Flemish city's canals. 

And then you spot the tigers, lurking in the long grass of this print. 

Hidden behind a latticework of foliage, they're waiting to pounce. This is Camouflage. 

We liked quite a lot of Tōshi's output (there are other landscapes and townscapes too, of varying degrees of abstraction). However, we passed relatively quickly through the third room in this show, featuring Hiroshi and Fujio's second son Hodaka and his wife Chizuko, whose work is predominantly abstract. Hodaka also dabbled in Pop Art, but those pieces didn't really do a lot for us, and we found this display of the pair's prints pretty dull. A bit of a let-down after an enlightening first half of this exhibition. 

The final space, however, is delightful, though this photo definitely doesn't do it justice. 

This installation is by Hodaka and Chizuko's daughter Ayomi, expanding the motif of the cherry blossom from a mere print to fill an entire room, capturing the Transient Beauty of that most Japanese of symbols. Cherry-blossom viewing in Dulwich; it's possible this autumn, and unlike Hiroshi Yoshida, you can bring your camera in with you. 

Practicalities

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery until November 3. It's open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Sundays, as well as Bank Holiday Monday, and tickets cost £20 including a Gift Aid donation (up £3.50 from last year's Berthe Morisot exhibition, we noted). To be sure of getting in when you want to, you can book online here. Allow up to 90 minutes to take in this show. Tickets also cover entry to the gallery's permanent collection, which includes a number of Rembrandts and perhaps most notably, Gainsborough's portrait of the Linley sisters.

The gallery is about 10 minutes walk from both West Dulwich station, for trains from Victoria, and North Dulwich station, for trains from London Bridge.

Images

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), Kumoi Cherry Trees, 1926. Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

Hiroshi Yoshida, Matterhorn, 1925, Fukuoka Art Museum

Hiroshi Yoshida, El Capitan, 1925. Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

Fujio Yoshida (1887-1987), Yellow Iris, 1954, Private collection. Photograph: Mareo Suemasa

Tōshi Yoshida (1911-1995), Bruges, 1955, Fukuoka Art Museum

Tōshi Yoshida, Camouflage, 1985, Fukuoka Art Museum
Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995), Profile of an Ancient Warrior, 1958. Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum
Ayomi Yoshida (born 1958), Transient Beauty, 2024, Installation at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Photograph: Graham Turner