20th Century Prints Capture Japan’s Social Confusion

History and lore hold that transitions between centuries are tough. The fact that the world is now headed for such an event lends particular interest to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, Japan had opened itself to Western ideas. The benefits of modernization resulted in by-now-predictable side effects. A baby boom crowded the islands, causing the young to flock to cities. This broke up traditional family structure and turned urban areas into unmanageable messes. Youth, feeling alienated, decided to make a virtue of loneliness by emphasizing individualism.

Inevitably this degree of progress unnerved that segment of the society allergic to change. A backlash developed. It urged sticking with the group and preserving those time-honored values that make the Japanese unique.

A pioneer of this idea in the art world was Tokyo print dealer and publisher Watanabe Sho-zaburo-. In 1906 he activated his dream of reviving the popular art of the ukiyo-e woodblock print. It had been the trademark of Japan’s “floating world” back in the days when Tokyo was called Edo. By Watanabe’s day, print technology was making the art obsolete. His idea of the shin-hanga (new print) would preserve a piece of Japan’s cultural ecology, but Watanabe wanted more. He wanted this new form to also express Japan’s progress--the individuality of the modern artist, the nation’s new cosmopolitanism. He wanted to sell prints to foreign visitors. He found like-minded collaborators in such artists as Hashiguchi Goyo-, Ito- Shinsui and Kawase Hasui to launch his enterprise.

Blending the best of the past with the finest of the new is always a seductive idea, but it doesn’t always work. The new-old tradition Watanabe started reminds one of nothing so much as televangelist broadcasts that use rock ‘n’ roll to sell religion. The combination sterilizes the former and trivializes the latter.

On the face of it, the problem would appear to arise from an attempt to hybridize incompatible forms. Traditional Asian pictorial art didn’t seriously try to represent three-dimensional space or volume except through suggestion. Shin-hanga prints incorporate Western academic drawing based on scientific systems like perspective and solid geometry. The results are often handsome but the deftness, wit and elegance of the old ukiyo-e prints gives way to images that seem to have lost confidence. For all their boldness of form, they are wistful and unsure.

A little white cat by Takahashi Sho-tei looks downright apologetic. A female character from a Kabuki play by Yoshikawa Kanpo- suddenly appears as the man-in-drag that he is. Representations of Geisha-style women by Torii Kotondo and other artists stand in vivid contrast to ukiyo-e prints. In the old days, such beauties could appear erotic even when clad in elaborate kimono. These women look antiseptic even when nude. A quality of neutered nostalgia and sentimentality comes creeping.

One slowly begins to wonder if the only thing amiss here is an off-the-mark combination of contrasting artistic concepts. After all, European art was greatly enriched by the influence of the Japanese print during the Postimpressionist era of fin de siecle. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec.

The missing element accounting for the strange edge on the shin-hanga prints is probably the surrounding social environment. The period of Japan’s “floating world” was very like Lautrec’s Paris: boisterous, debauched and exciting.

Shin-hanga prints were associated with the same segment of Japanese society that domesticated Kabuki theater. Conservative forces made what had been a gritty popular art into a form not unlike television with sex and violence expurgated. It’s a wonder artist Yamamura Toyonari could get away with a representation even as tough as his portrait of actor Onoe Matsusuke. Another shin-hanga artist made a series of wood blocks devoted to nudes presumably more frank than those on view. They were confiscated and burned by the authorities.

The exhibition was organized by LACMA assistant curator Hollis Goodall-Cristante. Her catalog introduction is pointedly written to ask us to think about how the cultural envelope that contains art can affect its spirit. The segment on view represents about half the total 106 works to be shown. The rest go on the walls in April in a section devoted to landscape and urban views.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through March 31, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.