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KOSHIRO

ONCHI

AFTER YAMAMOTO TURNED TO OTHER ENTHUSIASMS leadership fell to such men as Koshiro Onchi (1891-1955). With a scant ten years between Yamamoto's birth and his, he represented a new generation of men to whom hanga was a career and not a bypath (sometimes passionately pursued, but still a by path). Onchi's span of activity reached back to the days of the magazine Ho sun, and in all that time there was never any question but that he was a hanga artist.

He made up his mind to that almost as soon as he made up his mind to be an artist, both decisions being part of a pattern of revolt that carried him as far as possible from the kind of life he was brought up to.

His father, happily on the other side of the fence from Yamamoto's grandfather, was a? ruggedly conservative member of Emperor Meiji's highly formal court. A gentleman of the old school, uncompromisingly honest and unswervingly loyal, he was a favorite with the emperor. He served for a time as the court's master of ceremonies and then at the emperor's request he took over the education and discipline of the three young princes who were destined to wed the emperor's daughters. Koshiro, youngest of Onchi's four sons, was raised with the princes in the rigid atmosphere that characterized old-line education of members of the imperial family. Late in life he recalled one treasonous moment when he disrupted that atmosphere by slapping the young Prince Higashikuni, though he couldn't remember what the prince did to deserve it. One of the last jobs of book design which Onchi completed before his death was the autobiography of the prince, now plain mister since he lost his tide after the war.

Notwithstanding the slap, Onchi shared the princes' education under his stern and domineering father. He studied the Chinese classics with emphasis on Confucian doctrine, he spent long hours over his calligraphy, and he learned the classic theatre art of the nobility, Noh. He never forgot such roles as Yoshitsune in Funa-Benkei but he regarded Noh as fugitive from a museum, and the last time he saw a play was when, out of filial duty, he attended the farewell performance of a man to whom his father had been patron.

It was planned that young Onchi would be a doctor, and he entered a German middle school in Tokyo which specialized in premedical training. While he was there one elder brother died of a heart attack and another of tuberculosis, and when a sister died in the same span of two years, Onchi lost whatever faith and interest he had once had in medicine. His early interest in art had been sternly suppressed by his father, but after the shock of losing three of his children the old man relented, and at the age of seventeen Onchi entered the government art academy at Ueno.

However, any assumption that he was now happy in his chosen field would be premature. He was by this time in full revolt against his strict upbringing, and the authorities at Ueno bore the brunt of it. He shunned their compulsory athletics, he attended classes only when felt like it, and he painted as he chose. If this meant doing nudes in grey and blue instead of the warm fleshy tones demanded by the academy instructors, that was the way it was, and Onchi was not at all impressed by arguments that at least while he was a student he must paint as his instructors directed. On top of all this he was neglecting his oils for the absurd heresy of creative prints. In this atmosphere of mutual antagonism it is remarkable that Onchi's career at Ueno lasted as long as three years. When he was invited to leave, his departure was a double farewell, for at the same time he abandoned oil painting. From then on he devoted himself to hanga.

His decision to make hanga his career was influenced partly by the work of Yamamoto and the others in Hosun, but even more by the work of Europeans like Wassily Kandinsky and Edvard Munch, whose prints were then being reproduced in Tokyo. "I was especially impressed by Munch's expression of human feeling," Onchi said, "not his form but his content."

During the next ten or fifteen years creative prints and Onchi grew up together. He threw himself into the movement, and his fighting spirit gloried in the fact that the whole art world was lined up in opposition.

"At first we were simply ignored," he said, "and then, when we couldn't be ignored, we were ridiculed. All the shows were run by oil painters. If we were allowed to submit our work, it was hung on some remote wall and judged in the same category as the oils, by a jury composed of oil painters. Of course we got nowhere. The critics? They acted as if we didn't exist."

To further the cause he poured his energy and whatever money he could find into a series of art and literary magazines, most of which expired after a few issues. But he kept on fighting, and since he loved a good fight he had a fine time.

He didn't seriously try to earn money to support his family until the devastating earthquake of 1923 jolted him into a new sense of responsibility. His wife still recalls her excitement when he received fifty yen for a book design, the pleasant shock when she realized that her husband, too, could make money. Though he started late, from then on he earned a very comfortable living as one of Japan's foremost book designers. His early training in calligraphy may have contributed something too, for Onchi was regarded as a superlative designer of lettering, if that word may be stretched to include the complex ideographs used both in China and Japan.

Much as he revolted against it, his early environment must have been decisive in yet another respect, for his tastes were essentially aristocratic. He shunned Yamamoto's school for farmers and did not hesitate to express his displeasure with peasant art, an attitude that did not endear him to the powerful mingei group, which has sponsored the great revival of folk arts and crafts.

Onchi was deeply Japanese, but from the beginning of his career any overt Japanese influence on his work was negligible. He liked that considerable portion of Japanese art which is dominated by simplicity and elegance, but he never turned back to it for stimulation, and against ukiyoe he conducted full-scale rebellion. Elise Grilli, art critic of the Nippon Times, put it this way: "Onchi delighted in flaunting the conventions of ukiyoe prints. The meticulous craftsmanship, the virtuosity of line, the hair-raisingly painstaking printing from twenty or thirty separate blocks, the finicky precision in overlapping the colors, and, in recent times, the overwhelming cleverness in naturalistic representation—all this he threw out the window with a single toss and a hearty laugh. Now he could breathe again, freed from the claptrap of academic accretions."

Though he never went to Europe—his only trips outside Japan were to Formosa and later, in 1939, as an army artist to China—he was consistently oriented to the European rather than the Japanese, to the new rather than the old. This orientation is obviously reflected in his abstract work. In deference to realists like Yamamoto he made realistic prints for exhibition until World War II loosened his inhibitions, but abstract art had always been his paramount interest, and during the last ten or fifteen years of his life his output was almost entirely abstract. It was in these later years that he wrote: "Abstract art is now, as it should be, the main way of art, and I hope that our civilization soon comes to realize this. My work falls short of my expectations, short of what I want it to be, but I keep it up as one pioneer doing his part to cultivate this vast land. If my work happens to be poor, the fault is mine alone and not that of the method."

To Onchi hanga was not only a great medium but one uniquely suited to abstract art. He stressed this in his book, The Modern Hanga of Japan:

"Among the mediums of hanga the one most removed from the brush painting is the woodcut. A woodcut is best when the chisel in the wood is used most naturally. The virtue of hanga lies in the certainty that it comes from a creative process which permits no sham. Unlike brush painting, it allows no wavering of the hand. It is honest—sham and errors show. Some liberty may be allowed in the registry but so little that it, like the carving, is a process which permits no delusion... hanga rejects the accidental and rejects ornamentation... and it contains the most constructive process in graphic art, the advantage of superimposing pictures. For this reason hanga is probably the most suitable method yet found for the expression of modern art, which lays stress on construction."

His emphasis on abstract art gave rise to one misunderstanding, a common belief that he did not regard the ability to draw as important to the hanga artist. Onchi could draw with mastery. "Of course," he said, "one must be able to draw and sketch to make realistic prints. For abstracts, on the other hand, the important thing is composition and construction."

It was chiefly in his abstract prints that Onchi pioneered new techniques and probed the use of new materials. A print must be made with a block, to be sure, but this definition does not prescribe how the block is to be made. For his printing blocks Onchi used paper, cardboard, string, a rubber heel, charcoal, textiles, the fins of a fish, leaves—anything that came to hand and caught his lively imagination. He sometimes laughed at his own improvisations and accused himself of cheating, but this free use of materials remains one of his greatest contributions.

Michener has lighted up the whole creative-print movement with his story of how Onchi made one of the greatest of the modern prints, the brilliant portrait of his friend the poet Sakutaro Hagiwara (print 10). However, a look at how he made the lovely Poem Number 22: Leaf and Clouds (print 14) shows him at work on a more typical (because non-realistic) print and illustrates his innovations in technique and materials.

Onchi started with a pencil sketch of his basic design. The sketch, same size as the finished print, was a composition based on four different forms and a natural leaf. Having finished his design, he cut the four forms from waxed paper which he had carefully saved from the wrapping around cigarette cartons (Onchi was an inveterate saver, couldn't bear to throw anything away). The accompanying diagram shows these forms in proportionate size and numbered in the order in which he printed with them.

His fifth "block" was a natural leaf from a yuzuriha tree. These glossy leaves are often used with oranges and white paper to decorate doorways at New Year's time, and when this attractively worm-eaten specimen had appeared some prior New Year, Onchi had spotted it and added it to his hoard. In order to print from it he glued it to a thin board only a little larger than the leaf.

When he was ready to print, Onchi placed his sketch underneath a piece of clear glass so that the design showed through to give him a "map." Taking waxed-paper form number 1, he brushed ink on it, putting most of the ink close to the edge of the paper. For his ink he used regular sumi, adding a little vegetable mucilage called nori. He placed the paper form on the glass, matching its position with the design beneath and with the inked side down against the glass. Then he took the paper which he wanted to print and laid it on the glass over the waxed-paper form. Since he had no Kento, to position his paper he matched the corners with those of the sketch beneath. Finally he took his baren and rubbed the back of his paper just as though he were printing from a wood block. The ink, pressed between the glass and the impermeable waxed-paper form, oozed out around the edges of the form, and as it did so it printed on the paper above. Because Onchi printed on a fairly hard-surfaced, non-absorbent paper called Kyokushi, the pattern of the irregular ooze was in some places quite wide.

That much done, Onchi removed the waxed-paper form, wiped the glass clean, applied some more ink to the same form, placed it about an inch lower than he had the first time, and repeated the process.

Then he used form number 2 in the same manner, printing with it in three different positions. Form number 3 he used once, and with it he introduced his only color other than black, a golden tan in a water-color paint. Form number 4, the small triangle, was printed three times with ink much blacker than that used on the bigger forms.

Last of all came the leaf, mounted on its small board. Onchi removed the glass because the board might skid on it, and positioned this block directly on the design, leaf up. Jet-black ink was brushed on the leaf, and then he placed his paper down on top of it as though it were a wood block, again matching corners with the sketch in lieu of a Kento and printing with his baren in normal fashion.

If the finished print passed his critical inspection, Onchi stamped his name (here spelled Onzi—he made no virtue of consistency in spelling his own name in Roman letters) in the lower right corner (it can be seen in the reproduction just under the stem), and the work was complete. It is safe to say that it had been work undertaken in joy, carried through with exuberance, and finished swiftly. He tried to finish a job before the fun went out of it. "I have a good life," he liked to say, "and I want that to show in my work."

Over a period of a year and a half Onchi made ten copies of this print, and then, although he saved the handsome leaf, he destroyed his paper blocks. This was a large edition for him, because when he had made one print that satisfied him the act of creation was complete, and much as it might exasperate those who tried to collect his prints, he usually felt an overpowering urge to drop the matter there.

In speaking of the portrait of Sakutaro Hagiwara, Michener has told of the pains that Onchi took to find the right paper. He printed that portrait on four different papers with results ranging from superb to worthless, and it was the paper that told the story. Said Onchi: "I give half the credit for the world-wide fame of ukiyoe color prints to the wonderful hosho and masagami papers on which they were made. For example, it's the paper which is responsible for the sensuous beauty of the women's complexions.''

For most of his prints Onchi preferred a finely textured, firm but absorbent, white paper called edogawa, but true edogawa hasn't been made since the war, and like many of the other artists he mostly used torinoko.

Present-day torinoko has been criticized as being a short-lived paper and therefore unsuitable for making prints, but it is popular among the artists nevertheless. In the old days vellum-like torinoko made from the short silky fiber of the gampi plant was one of Japan's most magnificent papers. Unfortunately, gampi grows only wild in the mountains and cannot be cultivated, so that the supply is scarce and the paper made from it is expensive. Moreover, gampi paper is basically unsuited for making prints because it is not absorbent. The paper called torinoko today is an imitation, made from various combinations of mitsumata and pulp. It comes in a number of grades depending on the amount of pulp which has been added, and of course, the more pulp the cheaper the paper. Grades 1 and 2 are usually considered too pure, that is they do not contain enough pulp to give the paper the proper absorbency. Grade 3 is the most popular and grade 4 is also used. Since torinoko is the paper used to face Japanese doors (fusuma), it comes in rolls about six feet by three, so that there is very little limitation on the size of a print. It can also be obtained in sheets. Some of the artists, like Jun'ichiro Sekino, order a specially made torinoko, of a quality particularly adapted to prints.

Because of Onchi's great range, it is not easy to select a few outstanding prints, but among his portraits one must name Sakutaro Hagiwara (print 10), Shizuya Fujikake, and Impression of a Violinist (frontispiece); in his realistic vein, Among the Rocks (print 9), The Temple of Confucius in Formosa, and Ripples, a study of a Chinese washerwoman; and from his abstract work, Objet Number 2 (print 8), Lyric Number 13: Melancholy of Japan (print 12), Poem Number 8-1: Butterfly (print 13), and Poem Number 22: Leaf and Clouds (print 14).

It was no mere whim that caused Onchi to name some of his prints "Poems," for, like his friend Hagiwara, Onchi was a poet. Almost every one of his major prints was coupled with a poem, free in form, subtle and allusive, often as abstract as the print it attended.

Artist and poet, his emotions were close to the surface, and they quickly welled up in bursts of feeling. In his notes he set down how he came to make the tragic mask called Impression of a Violinist (frontispiece). It was 1947 and he had been invited by his good friend William Hartnett to one of the concerts that Hartnett arranged for Occupation audiences. The evening was a triumph for Hartnett because he had been able to persuade Nejiko Suwa, one of Japan's great violinists, to play. Miss Suwa, a proud person and a perfectionist who seldom plays in public because of the impossibly high standards she sets for herself, had suffered in the war, and Onchi felt the undertones as he watched her play to an American audience at a time when Japan's defeat was still fresh. "A harsh electric light showed the strain in her face," he wrote, "and I saw tragedy there. Suddenly my eyes were blurred with tears."

Though Onchi was easily moved, he usually overflowed with the joy of life. He loved to sing, to others if they'd listen, to himself if they wouldn't. He sang even in his last illness, but his repertoire gradually narrowed to Jesus Loves Me, in either Japanese or English, and one song of yearning for the homeland which was sung so much during the war that the words stuck with him. "I try to sing other songs," he would explain, "but they always come out as one of those two."

Onchi's death was a blow to his fellow artists. They miss the healthy ferment of his work, which kept them all on their toes, and they miss the man—his surging creative force, his bigness of spirit, his imagination, wit, and integrity. Still he left them a creed of vitality, of honesty, and of freedom, and it seems safe to say that, as long as they look to it, the movement will neither stagnate nor crystallize. That, of course, is good. That is a legacy worth leaving.

9. Among the Rocks (1929)

10. Portrait of SaKutaro Hagiwara (1943)

11. Bird (1935)

12. Lyric Number 13: Melancholy of Japan (1952)