A reinvention of printmaking

In the Japanese Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a retrospective of Munakata Shiko (1903-1975) surveys an unusual career characterized by a mighty struggle to invest new life into a tradition that had faltered. Ambitious, gifted and far more adventuresome than most of his countrymen, Munakata was not altogether successful in his pursuit.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the later stages of a lengthy era of unprecedented social stability in Japan had given birth to an extraordinary cultural efflorescence. Economic power was passing from the samurai elite to a new urban merchant class, and it wanted art that spoke to its own experience. Japanese painters began to make woodblock prints that responded to the shift -- images that, unlike a one-of-a-kind painting, could be made in large editions in reaction to the rapidly expanding new audience. Their subject, exquisitely rendered in a range of eye-boggling techniques, was the fleeting quality of life and its earthly pleasures. Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of a floating world,” came to define the glory of Japanese printmaking.

Like most such phenomena, the glorious definition eventually passed into the realm of stale cliche. Japanese printmaking went into steep, long-standing decline. Then, along came Munakata.

“The Mountain; the Sea; Dedicated to My Virtuous Parents” shows what he was capable of. Made in 1958, it’s a monumental work that unfolds on a pair of eight-panel standing screens. Each of the two prints, assembled from multiple sheets of paper, is 5 1/2 feet tall and more than 14 feet wide. The screens are a tour de force.

Printed only in black ink, which is applied to both sides of the thin paper and ranges from luminous gray to pitch black, the landscapes are picked out in a flashing torrent of delicate white lines. Sharp mountains and roiling seas are interlocked through diagonal cuts. Between the jagged peaks of earth and water, the shapes of diamonds, triangles and lozenges suggest niches, caves and womb-like voids. Indistinct but evocative figures of Buddha flicker within them, animating the landscape.

In Munakata’s dynamic screens, nature comes to life as a mysterious sacred space. The concept is a traditional one in Japanese art, and the artist calls on the vaunted medium of woodblock and the revered format of a folding screen to invoke a sense of honored custom. But, by forcing two distinct traditions together into something wholly new, Munakata also shows that he has other, more experimental things on his mind.

Formally, the graphic technique of “The Mountains; the Sea” resembles nothing so much as Willem de Kooning’s great abstract black paintings from the late 1940s. The resemblance is not an accident. Munakata was an Expressionist at heart, and his interest in Modern art in the West was keen.

“I want to become the next Van Gogh,” said this son of a poor, rural blacksmith when, as a 19-year-old kid, he ventured to Tokyo to pursue a career in painting. The elegant and informative bilingual catalog to the show, which was jointly organized by LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the private Munakata Museum in Aomori City, Japan, explains that he worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, ceramics and calligraphy. (The curators -- LACMA’s Robert T. Singer and Munakata Yoshiaki, the artist’s son -- have put a few examples of each on view, including small floral paintings in thick, blazingly colored impasto and some exceptional decorated plates.) But woodblock printing proved to be a special attraction -- partly because Munakata was extremely nearsighted and the medium suits close work. A video shows him hunched over, cutting into a block with great speed and furious deliberation.

The Van Gogh remark demonstrates the wonderful spirit and frank enormity of Munakata’s ambition. Yet, it’s also indicative of his provincial beginnings. By 1924, the Dutch painter had been dead for more than 30 years. Art had moved on.

Early works in the LACMA exhibition show Munakata developing a sharp, blunt line and covering the entire sheet with tangled imagery. Horror vacuii -- a fear of empty space -- is endemic to his work throughout his career.

The thick black tracery outlines figures, landscapes and elements of still life. Color, sometimes printed and sometimes painted, emphasizes primary and secondary hues. The absorbent paper often washes out the color, softening the jangle of black. Take 1963’s “A Self-Portrait with Joy”: It’s a bit like an aggressive, Expressionist version of a painting by Fernand Leger or Raoul Dufy, or the later paintings of Marc Chagall.

It is also an acquired taste -- which I haven’t yet acquired. Munakata’s work is more appealing for the gutsiness of the project than for the haphazard result. He was attempting to remake traditional Japanese woodblock prints in a modern context--ukiyo-e for an apocalyptic world of fresh anxieties. A modest, elegant medium was being pushed toward something big, brash and wild. American Abstract Expressionists had banished easel painting in favor of the wall-size scale of murals, and Munakata followed suit by pumping up the humble woodblock print to the scale of a folding screen. His work emphasized an almost manic quality of public performance, and he experimented at every turn.

But the work -- which will be rotated in the exhibition because of fragility -- rarely seems to gel. Its frequent ugliness (which can elsewhere be a virtue) just grates. Oddly, Munakata’s prints seem unconcerned with the obvious modern antecedent of German Expressionist woodcuts, in favor of melding Japanese traditions with French tastes and New York sensibilities. It’s an uneasy fit.

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‘Munakata Shiko: Japanese Master of the Modern Print’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Ends: March 2

Price: $7

Contact: (323) 857-6522