Читать книгу Collecting Modern Japanese Prints - Norman Tolman - Страница 11

Preface

It is reported that when asked their occupation, some 70,000 Japanese listed it specifically as "artist." One can realize then the impossibility of including more than a handful in this book, even though we are concentrating only on the Modern print. Our purpose is to tell the story of contemporary prints from a position of our own close involvement for more than a quarter of a century, starting as poor students, continuing as diplomats (still poor but with better connections), and moving through the period of beginning, evolving, maturing, and finally becoming successful art dealers and avid collectors for whom, at present, finding has become more of a challenge than acquiring.

Our point of view is necessarily a particular one from which we hope to lead new collectors along a path we have already trod, minus the pitfalls. Naturally we have written about those artists whom we have come to know best personally.

This book contains several bodies of information. An introductory essay puts Japanese prints into historical perspective and gives a brief outline of techniques. The second section, "Then," illustrated with prints by the older masters of the twentieth century, seeks to describe how we went about putting together our collection. There should not be many surprises here since these artists, many in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, will be known and easily recognized by anyone who has even a minor interest in Modern Japanese prints. These artists have been written about at great length elsewhere, though not perhaps from our unique viewpoint as collectors and dealers.

The following section, "Between Then and Now," is a lengthy essay meant to be amusing. In this book about collecting, this essay gives a play-by-play description of a collector and his determined search for a specific print. It was not intended to be the ultimate in name-dropping, but was included to indicate the esteem and admiration that Japanese prints command abroad.

The last section, "Now," using fifty artists with fifty illustrations to explain specific points about print collecting, gives not only objective facts about each artist and his work but also includes anecdotes that may help a collector better recognize and remember them. Some of these artists have already been briefly mentioned in the "Then" section. We wish to state that not all of the artists talked about are artists whom we handle in our gallery; we also hasten to point out that all of the artists whom we do carry are, of course, included here.

We have presented all of the prints in full color, in as large a format as possible, so that the art lover can savor the details of each work. We sell prints every day and have attempted to write the text in a rather breezy manner, in much the same way we deliver our presentation to clients from more than thirty-five nations. Since we have been doing this for twenty years, we have come to realize what sort of information people are looking for to make a print come alive for them.

During the gathering of the prints in the "Then" section, we were young students and following that, diplomats. There was never a single purchase that did not require a sacrifice since, as everyone knows, neither students nor diplomats are noted for voluminous amounts of disposable income. Nevertheless, we found that our involvement with prints came to be one of the most absorbing and satisfying aspects of our lives. We continued to search for the works we read about, saw illustrated, yearned over at galleries and museums, or simply stumbled across in unlikely places. Needless to say, this hobby cramped us monetarily for years.

After a while, when we found our original occupation to be less and less rewarding both emotionally and financially, we decided to make a change and become art dealers, a decision we have never regretted. This did not happen overnight. During the years Norman worked in the Cultural Office (USIS) of the American Embassy in Tokyo and in its various branches throughout Japan, quite a bit of time was given to visiting divers artists, escorting state visitors to interesting ateliers, helping artists with little English-language ability answer their overseas correspondence, arranging the presence of artists at ambassadorial dinners or other embassy functions, and, in general, having a great deal of contact with the Japanese art scene.

It does not occur to most people that one cannot actually go to school and take a few courses to learn how to be an art dealer. On-the-job training seems to be the only road to knowledge in this area. But our very strong interest and heavy private involvement provided an inestimable background and a certain amount of preparation for our new career.

Being young and idealistic, we were also quite ignorant in not realizing what it would be like to start a business from zero with 1) no business experience, 2) insufficient capital, and 3) no known clients. What we did have in our favor was unquenchable enthusiasm and a deep and total sense of adventure to spur us on, along with two small daughters who enjoyed their three square meals a day. As they say nowadays, it's the bottom line that counts. After the usual amount of trial and error and occasional success, with a certain amount of good luck usually measurable in direct proportion to the hard work entailed, we eventually managed to evolve a formula of doing business that has enabled us to have a life filled with encounters with artists, with the prints we love, and with our clients, who obviously enjoy our enthusiasm for this aspect of Japanese culture. But hard work it was, harder than we thought we were capable of—even more arduous than the years we had spent learning to speak, read, and write Japanese.

Japanese etiquette requires that people apologize in advance for situations and circumstances in which Westerners would not necessarily feel a need. Having lived here for a long time, we know that we must extend our expressions of regret to the many outstanding artists whom we could not include in this book.

As we have mentioned, writing a personal book means having the prerogative to draw on specific prints and on particular contacts with certain people. Naturally we have chosen the ones we know and like best but at the same time feel that they present a very good picture of the print world from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, as witnessed by us during the two separate phases of our encounter, first as collectors and later as dealers. We hope that readers will begin to learn about and to recognize the works of the various artists and will come to enjoy and understand to some extent the breadth and depth of the contemporary Japanese print world.

Since this is not intended to be a scholarly work, we hope readers will approach it with the idea of enjoying our experiences as we have lived them, and perhaps finding relevance in their own quests as collectors.