On November 21st, Dr. Monika Hinkel gave the talk, “Reflections on Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking”, where I had the opportunity to hear about the first exhibition in Europe that featured all three generations of artists of the Yoshida family. Dr. Hinkel began with the discovery of Yoshida Hiroshi’s signature in the Dulwich Picture Gallery visitor book, the catalyst of this exhibition. Through comparative presentation of the works by each artist in the family, Dr. Hinkel illustrated how each artist engaged with the past, and more importantly, with each other through their choice of subject matter, artistic styles, and sources of inspiration.
This past year, I had the opportunity to work with Yoshida family prints and paintings through internships at art galleries in New York, and what has always stood out to me is the way in which each Yoshida family artist explored color. In the lecture, Dr. Hinkel emphasized this by noting how the first generation, Yoshida Hiroshi and his wife Fujio, brought Western-style (yōga) painting traditions into their prints. While Hiroshi was blending Impressionism with ukiyo-e print traditions of the Edo period, Fujio instead drew inspiration from color and abstraction.
Moving onto the second generation, Dr. Hinkel highlighted the way that Yoshida Toshi, Hiroshi’s firstborn son, carried on the legacy of his father’s ‘new print’ shin-hanga style, reinterpreting some of Hiroshi’s works and also taking inspiration from traveling. However, it was only after Hiroshi passed away in 1950 that Toshi began to experiment with abstraction, something his father was strongly against, and truly developed his own style. Toshi’s journey as a printmaker speaks to the undeniably large presence that Hiroshi, the Yoshida patriarch, had on his family and their artistic direction.
The second son, Hodaka, on the other hand, made prints that were in opposition to his father and swore to never produce naturalistic art. Instead, he drew inspiration mostly from Western artists and pop art, creating abstract prints that were also influnced by his forays into collage, etching, lithography, and photography. As a ‘creative prints’ sōsaku-hanga artist, he succeeded in creating a new style that contrasted with his father’s while still drawing from previous print traditions, and even influencing his brother Toshi and his mother Fujio’s interests in abstraction.
Chizuko, Hodaka’s wife, also drew inspiration from the other Yoshida family artists. For example, she explored the same subject matter of the Tenryū-ji garden as her brother-in-law Toshi, but reworked it entirely in her own style. She also drew from the avant-garde circles in which she and Hodaka participated, and it is undeniable that their work shows the personal and artistic influences the couple had on each other.
At the Japan Society, I have been cataloguing the Gallery’s permanent collection which includes prints by several Yoshida family artists. In this article, I wanted to introduce the print, The Mud Wall in Nara by Hodaka, which I had never seen before. While Dr. Hinkel compared Toshi and Chizuko’s prints, this work by Hodaka from the same year, and most likely from the same trip, is stylistically even more similar to Chizuko’s depiction of the Tenryū-ji garden, despite differing subject matter. This work further emphasizes how the couple likely shared similar approaches to abstraction and took inspiration from one another.
Lastly, Dr. Hinkel touched on how Ayomi, from the third generation of the Yoshida family artists, challenges the tradition of printmaking even further as a conceptual artist. In an ethereal site-specific installation using prints in the final room of the exhibition, Ayomi stunningly reinterprets one of Hiroshi’s paintings into a room of meditative rest for the visitors. Though she has never met her grandfather, she could see and touch her grandfather’s signature in the visitor book, which was arguably the most poignant moment of the entire talk. This exhibition ultimately brought together a unique family of artists, whose works span over a century and yet remain in close conversation with each other.
I would like to thank Dr. Hinkel for sharing all these wonderful stories about the exhibition and the Yoshida family with us.
Grace Kim
Independent Researcher