ART REVIEW : Heroism Shines in ‘In Battle’s Light’ Prints

Japan joined the international power club after recovering from the loss of World War II, right? A new exhibition at UCLA reminds us that that’s just wrong.

Japan became a global player at the turn of the century. In 1894, it got in a fight with China. In 1904, it took on Russia. To everyone’s astonishment it beat both the dragon and the bear, becoming the first Asian nation to attain the dubious status of a Western imperial power. Naturally, Japan was rather pleased with itself.

The pleasure shows in “In Battle’s Light” a traveling exhibition of 80 spectacular color woodblock prints on view in the Wight Art Galleries at UCLA to Dec. 1. They were made as a form of patriotic self-congratulation by the victor in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars. Even the most ardent adult peacenik will enjoy these pyrotechnical exercises. They look like great comic-strip panels than grew up to become scenes in a David Lean extravaganza. They are exciting without gore, heroic without humiliation.

The Meiji period, when they were made, was the era of Japan’s conscious Westernization. Amazingly, the images tell us just that in visual language. Backgrounds are what we expect from traditional ukiyo-e --patterns of gnarled tree trunks, mountains disappearing in the mist, water swelling in graceful arabesques. Suddenly in the midst of all this appear handsome soldiers in black European-style uniforms, angular and dynamic. They march into space forced open by Western perspective. It’s like watching history evolve.

A general checks the accuracy of his artillery blasting away at enemy ships attacking his cliff fortress on a snowy day. A great war vessel founders. We watch it sink as if from a submarine. A patriotic private risks his life dashing through the smoke of battle to blow up opposing fortifications.

It’s as irresistibly riveting as those high-tech TV images of Operation Desert Storm. For a minute you forget war is hell. For a minute you forget that there are things going on in these prints that prints just aren’t supposed to be able to do.

In Japan, full-color color printing is called nishiki-e . Such prints are made by inking shapes cut from flat blocks of wood. That generally means that creating atmospheric effects is next to impossible. Yet here we have them--silhouetted sentinels standing in the night rain watching a distant explosion, a rank of enlisted men disappearing into the fog while mounted officers consult ceremonially.

Every scenario is so vivid and convincing, it’s hard to believe the artists were not on the spot. They weren’t. Most of these three-panel spectaculars were made safely back home in Tokyo--and are the result of teamwork. Lowly paid artists did the drawings. Anonymous craftsmen cut blocks and printed. Fame has previously paid scant attention to artists such as Kobayashi Kiyochika, Migita Toshihide or Toyohara Chikanobu.

It is hard to believe these amazing things are all but unknown in the art world, scorned by aesthetes and ignored by scholars. Lucky for us, collectors Jean and Frederic Sharf developed a passion for them. Lucky for them, Worchester Art Museum curator Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton put together this exhibition and catalogue.

There are things that put one off about this work. Like looking at one too many graphic novels by Paolo Serpierior Milo Manara, these aggressive images just wear you out after while. There is also a repellent edge to any art that is fundamentally propagandistic.

The compensations, however, tip the balance. The Japanese are traditionally masters of pictorial narrative: A picture of a captain slicing a man’s head in half is polite enough to let the victim’s flying hat stand for his flesh. It is also so well planned, you understand precisely what has led up to this moment and what will follow.

Some pictures capture the inescapable poetry of battle. There is a wonderful scene of a night skirmish where the action can only be seen reflected in water. It could be a subtle protest against war’s chaos.

Another print exhibition equally, if not quite so coherently, on view at UCLA is “The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts: 35 Years of Acquisitions” (to Nov. 17). It presents 125 prints, drawings and photographs spanning time from the Renaissance to the present. That’s the same period covered by the whole collection, which also includes Japanese prints.

It began in 1956 as a repository for 5,000 works from the collection of Fred Grunwald and has ballooned over the decades to encompass about 35,000 works. Generations of scholars have profited from being able to study at first hand such rarities as Albrecht Durer’s dense masterpieces “Melancholia I” and “The Great Fortune or Nemesis.”

Aside from admiring its quality and depth, one is rather hard-pressed to find any binding threads running through such a worthy portmanteau exercise. If anything does pull it all together, it may be a relative absence of abstraction and the evidence of a certain tough-mindedness.

One of the earliest Grunwald masterworks is Andrea Mantegna’s “Bacchanal With Silenus.” Mantegna was among Italian Renaissance pioneers in the realistic use of anatomy and perspective. His rendering of corpulent revelers, satyrs and fauns is nothing if not rigorous. It plays off against a lingering medieval decorativeness in the etching line that creates an interesting tension between beauty and the grotesque.

The tendency to not flinch shows up again in Jusepe de Ribera’s “Man With the Goiter.” It reminds us of those epochs when life was short and brutal. It is nearly miraculous that Rembrandt, using basically the same pictorial means, could have arrived at images of such humane depth as “Christ Preaching.”

Among the modern periods, the Grunwald is especially strong in French Post-Impressionism and German Expressionism. Gauguin’s color woodcut “Te Po” is a masterpiece of the mysteries of the exotic. The timeless anxiety of relations between the sexes shows up. In Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Debauchery,” they smell of Baudelaire’s evil flowers. In Picasso’s “Faun Uncovering a Woman,” lust is mythologized. George Grosz’s watercolor “New York Street Scene” is an aesthetic jewel of the collection and a sour comment on domestic boredom curdling to contempt.

The contemporary section is neither large nor strong despite good holdings in Jasper Johns, Judy Dater and June Wayne. All together, however, the anniversary show is a scholar’s trove and a browser’s pleasure.

* UCLA, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, closed Mondays; (213) 825-9345 .