It’s easy to see why a curator, or any art lover for that matter, becomes fixated on the craftsmanship and beauty of Japanese woodblock prints, to the exclusion of any broader context. This genre, which first flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, transports you to a bright, bold world away from worries – a “floating world” no less – and has been lovingly continued over the past century by several generations of the Yoshida family. Yet a telling error in the caption and catalog entry betrays this show’s dangerous disregard for the sordid mess of reality outside the enchanted garden of art.
Looking at Yoshida Tōshi’s 1985 print Camouflage, in which two deadly, beautiful tigers are almost completely hidden by a tangle of golden grass, Dulwich Picture Gallery cheerfully tells you that it was inspired by his “travels in Africa in the 1970s and eighty”. One problem: tigers don’t live in Africa. A trivial mistake? Maybe. But it shows what this exhibition finds trivial: namely, everything beyond the narrowly defined subject of one family’s artistic creations and the skills they nurtured.
Camouflage itself suggests the bigger, badder “tiger” of history that this show ignores. Rather than an irrelevant journey to tiger-free Africa, the title certainly hints at a military significance. The abstract jungle in which this tiger hides may remind you of the Pacific islands, where Japanese and American soldiers camouflaged themselves in forests and thickets during some of the bitterest battles of World War II. Behind this pop art version of traditional Japanese printmaking – just like behind Andy Warhol’s camouflage paintings – may be the trauma of 20th century conflict.
To admit that possibility would be to open the floodgates to history in a way that this show is determined not to do. There is a “Japan Timeline and Yoshida Family Tree” in the catalog, but the timeline only reflects the traditional periodization of Japan’s eras, from the Edo to the current Reiwa. Yoshida Hiroshi – the exhibition first uses the Japanese custom of the family name – grew up in the Meiji and became an artistic star in the later Taisho era. And so forth.
Respecting Japanese culture is one thing, but using it to obscure historical facts is another. In the modern era that this exhibition covers, or rather not, Japan has established a powerful empire under a quasi-fascist military regime. It colonized Korea in 1910, invaded Manchuria in 1931, ruled this and other areas harshly, finally attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and started a war with the US that ended in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From these ruins emerged the success story of today’s democratic Japan.
I’m not bringing any of this up to cause trouble. It’s just that history would bring this rather boring show to life. You are expected to appreciate the art in such closed terms that your brain starts to wander – and ask uncomfortable questions. In fact, the Yoshida family built their success on international openness. When Yoshida Hiroshi visited Europe and the US as a young man, she discovered how much Westerners, including Monet, Van Gogh and Whistler, loved the Japanese art of observational realism called Ukiyo-e.
Yoshida in turn adopted their discoveries, and even their environment. His 1925 view, Canal in Venice, turns into a Ukiyo-e view of the dreamy Italian tourist town. Beginning in the 17th century in Edo – modern-day Tokyo – artists developed this style, best known in woodblock prints, to capture daily life in the city’s pleasure district. Yoshida looks at Venice as if it were old Edo. Rather than focusing on light and color, like Monet, he is fascinated by the tourists, comically depicting tourists crowding into an overloaded gondola. He does the same in Egypt, paying as much attention to graphically sharp Bedouins as to the Sphinx. I thought of Tintin – whose creator Hergé was another Western artist influenced by Japanese prints.
These are refined pleasures, combining the styles of Hiroshige and Hokusai with the Impressionists they influenced. In the 1930s, Yoshida Hiroshi is purely traditionalist. Instead of cities and foreigners, he depicts parks and temples. In 1940, he portrays people in kimonos visiting Ninnaji Temple in northwest Kyoto, an ancient site associated with Japan’s emperors: other prints from the same years show a bamboo forest and an old bridge through cherry blossoms.
The spiritual conservatism is clear. These claims about Japanese national and cultural identity, so much less alive than Yoshida Hiroshi’s earlier views of America’s Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, are undoubtedly adapted to the extreme ideology of the military regime that led Japan to destruction at the time.
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel An Artist of the Floating World, a traditionalist artist is haunted by his possible association with Japan’s fascist era. The comparison is undoubtedly unfair, but the reality of dictatorship, nationalism and war is so completely ignored here that you think there is something to hide. The exhibition omits Hiroshi’s views on China and Korea under Japanese rule; charming images that reveal none of the violent truth. The catalog briefly mentions his 1937 series of “12 prints about Korea and Manchuria,” which are not on display. It was clear that this was propaganda for Japanese imperialism.
Had we explored this, we could have better understood and appreciated Yoshida. After all, the catalog mentions that his son Tōshi made traditional prints in the 1940s “but with references to the impact of war”, but we do not see those again. Instead, we jump to 1951, when Yoshida Tōshi is making abstract prints influenced by modern American art. There are also Jackson Pollock swirls everywhere in his brother Hodaka’s work. Paradoxically, these attempts at abstract expressionist printmaking are much less dated than their father’s work. They certainly reflect the cultural dilemma of post-1945 Japan as it sought a new identity. Again, a broader context would help.
In the 1960s it all comes to life as Japan embraces pop culture. In 1971, Yoshida Tōshi finds himself in Santa Fe, New Mexico, observing a crowd of hippies, tourists and Indians with a humor and irony that goes straight back to Hokusai through his father. Woodcuts contributed to the invention of modern art and still have an astonishing ability to capture modern life.
In a 1995 print by Yoshida Chizuko, we see Tokyo’s skyscrapers disappear into a rainy mist, saturated with blue and pink ink. Venerable craftsmanship meets raw metropolis in a vision of reality that breaks the aesthetic prison of this show.
• At Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, June 19 to November 3