NORTH-SOUTH EAST-WEST
: DIALOGUE & DIVERGENCE
Despite
the early precedence of Hannibal, the Alps remained
a barrier between northern and southern Europe until
the Middle Ages. When printmaking began in the 14th
century it developed independently in Germany in
the North and in Italy in the South. But the easy
portability of printed impressions helped to spread
artistic ideas and by the close of the 14th century
artists themselves had begun to travel. For the next
two centuries European artistic development was largely
the product of an aesthetic dialogue between Italy
and the rest of Europe.
Printmaking
developed in the north from a background of goldsmithery,
in an artistic tradition that was still gothic, while
in Italy Renaissance ideals already held sway. In
the north the Master E.S., Schongauer, Israhel van
Meckenham and the Master A.G. made plates that were
mainly religious in subject or reflected everyday
life, in a style characterised by the graceful line
and overall pattern-making of International Gothic.
In Italy Mantegna and Pollaiuolo, amongst the greatest
masters of the Early Renaissance, emulated Antique
classical relief sculpture in ideal themes taken from
classical mythology, carried out with an understanding
of underlying form and the illusion of three-dimensional
space. In Italian art the artist’s imagination
in the invention of his design, the drawing of the
figures in movement both physical and psychological,
were all important; in the north, a delight in background
detail, observation of the natural world, and the domestic
reality of everyday life were appreciated.
About
1500, with the dawn of the new century and a new
generation of artists and engravers, which included
three of the greatest and most influential printmakers,
Dürer in Germany, Lucas van Leyden in the Netherlands
and Raimondi in Italy, the scene was set for
a fruitful exchange of northern and Italian predilections.
Dürer
first visited Venice in 1495; and again in 1506 when
there was an outbreak of plague in Nuremberg. The
Venetian Jacopo de’ Barbari settled in Nuremberg
in 1500 and spent the rest of his life in Germany and
the Netherlands. Raimondi’s stay in Venice coincided with
Dürer’s second visit to the city. Jacopo
de’ Barbari introduced Dürer to the classical
canons of proportion and linear perspective; and each
showed awareness of the other’s engraving
style in their plates. Raimondi coped Dürer's
woodcuts and engravings before settling in Rome about
1510 and his mature engraving style was established
under the influence of Dürer’s method of crosshatching.
Lucas van Leyden borrowed from both Dürer and
Raimondi; Raimondi incorporated Lucas’s landscape
backgrounds, as well as landscape motifs from Dürer,
into his engravings based on Raphael’s figure
designs.
Northern artists learnt the vocabulary and subject
matter of Ancient Rome; Italian artists absorbed the
northern observation of nature and discovery of landscape
and genre as themes.
Printmaking
was introduced to France by Italian artists invited
by François I to Fontainebleau; the
beginning of a particularly close artistic relationship
between the two countries. Emigré Frenchmen
Beatrizet and Lafrery were leading publishers in Rome
in the 16th century; and in the 17th century Callot
trained and spent a number of years in Florence, while
Claude settled permanently in Rome and became one of
Italy’s greatest artists. Stefano della Bella
moved in the opposite direction and spent a number
of years in Paris.
Italy
was the first country to establish art academies
and as the home of the Renaissance as well as the
site of antique classical remains, a visit became
an essential part of European art education. It was
visiting foreign artists who first recorded the picturesque
quality of ancient ruins and discovered the landscape
of the Roman campagna, opening Italian eyes to new
subject matter. The hunchback Dutch artist Pieter
van Laer (later nicknamed Bamboccio –‘ugly doll’)
introduced low life subjects to Italy and those artists
in Rome who followed him in this genre were called I
Bamboccianti. Reciprocally the golden quality of
light which Dutch artists discovered in Italy was transposed
on their return home to their native landscapes.
While
in the catholic countries of Europe religious subjects
continued to inspire printmakers, Dutch political
independence, Protestantism and thriving middle-class
commerce encouraged an ambience to which Dutch artists
responded with specialised genres of marines, landscape,
interior domestic scenes, peasant ‘low life’ and
animals.
Through
the 19th century and even into the 20th century Italy
continued its role as an artistic magnet, though
increasingly to an ‘academic’ audience,
while Paris took the lead as the centre of the avant-garde.
Artists of the Modernist movements sort inspiration
in more primitive or exotic cultures.
Already
in the 18th century chinoiserie entered into European
design and ornamentation. In the early 19th century
political events such as Napoleon’s campaign
in North Africa and Greece’s struggle for independence
from the Ottomon empire excited among artists an awareness
of new orientalist motifs. However it was in the later
decades of the 19th century that the full impact of
the East struck European artists and determined a new
artistic language.
Ukiyo-e prints had developed as a national art
form in Japan through two centuries of isolation. Designed
for an internal market they showed the pleasures of
life in the city and with Hokusai and Hiroshige took
a new direction inspired by the beauties of the natural
world in the surrounding landscape. Japanese woodcuts
came to Europe initially as packing around imported
porcelain and works of art in the 1850’s but
caught the imagination of French artists and collectors
almost immediately. European art was looking for new
directions and Japanese woodcuts arrived at just the
right moment as signposts to modernism. The ‘invention’ of
photography made artists question the purpose of painting,
which since the Renaissance had sort an ever more realistic
depiction of the external world, a job the camera could
take over. Japanese woodcuts with their stylisation,
flattened forms, two-dimensional patterns offered a
new approach to picture making.
Although
the Dutch with their long trading associations with
the Far East already had an interest in eastern artefacts,
France led the way in japonisme and sparked the interest
in the other countries of Europe. At first French
artists simply found in Japanese objects a new subject
matter for still life, a hint of exoticism in ornamental
props but soon they adapted the new formal language
they found in the Japanese woodcut, the various compositional
devices, to their own artistic preoccupations. They
also adopted the motifs most frequently met in the
woodcuts of artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige
(for it was with the work of these near contemporaries
that they were most familiar) – the arching bridge,
trees, herons, cats, rain, umbrellas; all motifs readily
observable as part of everyday western city life too.
Japanese recording of intimate moments in domestic
life and their portraits of famous actors and courtesans
opened up new possibilities of subject matter to the
Impressionists that had not been acceptable to earlier
academicism steeped in classical ideals. Such Japanese
themes and compositional devices as the high view point
which pulls the picture space up to the picture plane;
diagonal emphasis to the composition; ‘punctuating’ posts
and tree trunks to give vertical divisions; forms stylized
to simple outlines or silhouettes; truncated objects
suggestive of continuing space outside the picture;
became so much absorbed into modern European tradition
that it is easy to forget its Japanese stereotype.
From
the 1850’s Japanese artists were reciprocally
open to ideas from the West and began introducing linear
perspective. They established art schools in Japan
along western lines and trained students in western
methods. By the early 20th century Japanese artists
were visiting Europe and America and some, such as
Foujita, settled permanently in the West. The 'Sosaku
Hang' artists wished to renew the declined ukiyo-e tradition
by developing woodcut along western lines as the original
creative expression of a single artist who designed
and produced his own prints (the Japanese tradition
had remained a co-operative one, involving the publisher,
a designing artist, a cutter and a printer). The 'Shin
Hang' tendency, influenced by the popularity in Europe
of 19th century traditional Japanese colour woodcuts
wished to revive ukiyo-e prints in modernised form.
Both schools declined when Japan was isolated once
more when she invaded Manchuria and during the Second
World War. After the War Japanese artists were fragmented
and closer to western individualism and international
modernism.
The
impact of printed colour found in Japanese prints,
particularly of the 19th century artists such as Hokusai
and Hiroshige whose prints exploited the new bright
strongly pigmented aniline dyes, was slower to affect
the West than the absorption of motif and compositional
device. But by the 1880’s and especially in the
1890’s the “Colour Revolution” as
it has been termed took place. Although Henri Rivière
and Auguste Lepère experimented briefly with
colour woodcut, lithography and aquatint were the preferred
techniques for colour printmaking among French artists.
It was the revival of the very concept of colour printing,
rather than the Japanese technique or colour range,
that excited them. Conversely, in the early decades
of the 20th century, artists, particularly in Britain
and Austria, took to colour woodblock making and printing
by the Japanese method, though to express traditional
western motifs in Western style.
Though
the political situation has changed in recent decades
and there is no longer an isolated Eastern Block
in Europe, printmaking in Czechoslovakia, Hungary
and Poland remains relatively unknown in western Europe.
Impressions are not readily available in eastern or
western Europe, so that only a small selection by 20th
century artists from eastern Europe is included in
this catalogue. Several of these were also influenced
by japonisme. Like their ‘ancestor’ Wenceslaus
Hollar, some worked for a time or emigrated permanently
to the West. Mucha, Emil Orlik, Frantizek Simon and
Joseph Hecht won international reputations settled
in France or Germany and testify to the
internationality of artists’ printmaking in the
early 20th century.
Both
the North-South and East-West polarities resulted
in the creation of new styles and motifs which enriched
the history and development of printmaking. Renaissance,
Baroque and 18th & early 19th century western art
evolved from the legacy of International Gothic in
contact with Ancient Rome and Greece. The Modern Movement
evolved from the impact of the East. It is interesting
to note a cycle of inspirational ideas; for the ‘primitiveness’ of
gothic, with blank (gold) backgrounds, an interest
in decorative patterns and its vertical, somewhat two-dimensional
picture space has much in common with the compositional
devices which so excited modern European artists when
they looked at Japanese prints. These similarities
to their own previous cultural history no doubt confirmed
the ‘new’ direction.
Published 1994
72 pages, 191 prints described and illustrated in b/w
(with 31 reproduced again in colour on the covers)
(UK
Price: £10, International orders: £15)
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Artists
included in the catalogue:
- Airey
A
- Armfield
M
- Austin
R
- Baldung
Grien H
- Bamberger
G
- Barbari
J de’
- Barker
A R
- Beham
S
- Béjot
E
- Bell
R A
- Bella
S della
- Berkley
S
- Bloemaert
A
- Bloemaert
F
- Bormann
E
- Both
J
- Boxius
S
- Brangwyn
F
- Breslern-Roth
N von
- Buckton
E
- Bye
M de
- Cameron
K
- Carracci
A
- Castiglione
B
- Cesio
C
- Chadell
J
- Clarke
A Legros
- Claude
le Lorrain
- Clilverd
G
- Coornhert
C V
- Copley
J
- Coster
G M de
- Degas
C G H
- Delacroix
E
- Delâtre
E
- Dente
M
- Detmold
E J
- Dietricy
C W E
- Dietterlin
W
- Dupérac
E
- Dürer
A
- East
A
- Foujita
T
- Galle
P
- Gellée
C
- Gey-Heinze
M
- Ghisi
G
- Gill
E
- Girdwood
S
- Goff
R
- Gray
J W
- Guérard
H
- Guthrie
J J
- Hackert
J P
- Haden
F S
- Hamblin-Smith
M L
- Hasegawa
S
- Hecht
J
- Hecke
J van den
- Hitchings
T C R
- Hockey
J M
- Hopfer
H
- Horky
F
- Hyde
H
- Ingres
J A D
- Jacquemart
J
- Jaques
B
- Kawanishe
H
- Keith
E
- Kirchner
E
- Kirkpatrick
E
- Klistan
A
- Komjati
J
- Ladstäter
A
- Lambert
A
- Lap
E
- Lee
S
- Lee-Hankey
W
- Legeay
J L
- Legrand
L
- Leighton
C
- Lepautre
J
- Loir
L
- Lord
E A
- Lucas
van Leyden
- Lutma
J
- MacLaughlan
D S
- Magnin
J
- Manet
E
- Maratta
C
- Master
AG
- Master
of the Die
- Menpes
M
- Middlehurst
F
- Montagna
B
- Moreelse
P
- Muckley
L F
- Musi
A
- Neumann
H
- Nevinson
C R W
- Nishiyama
H
- Nooms
R
- Okuyama
G
- Orlik
E
- Paillard
H
- Palmer
E
- Parker
M M
- Pepper
C H
- Phillips
W J
- Piquet
R
- Pissarro
O
- Platt
J E
- Platten
U
- Pott
C M
- Potter
P
- Raimondi
M
- Rankin
A L
- Rath
H
- Read
A R
- Reiner
I
- Rice
B
- Rice
E G
- Rivière
H
- Rosa
S
- Roussel
T
- Sadeler
J
- Schmutzer
F
- Scultori
G B
- Seaby
A W
- Shepherd
W J A
- Simon
T F
- Staeger
F
- Svabinsky
M
- Swanevelt
H
- Syme
E
- Takekushi
K
- Tyson
D P
- Urushibara
J
- Veneziano
A
- Vico
E
- Volkmann
H R von
- Vondrous
J C
- West
J W
- Wierix
A
- Whistler
J M
- Yoshida
H
- Zeeman
R
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