Kanae Yamamoto was a Japanese artist. He is credited with originating the "creative prints" movement, which aimed at self-expressive printmaking, in contrast to the commercial studio systems of ukiyo-e and shin-hanga. His works are soft and supple in their coloring.
Background
Kanae Yamamoto was born on October 24, 1882 in Okazaki, Aichi, Japan, into the family of Ichirō and Take Yamamoto. When he was five, Kanae and his mother joined Ichirō in Tokyo, where he studied medicine, and settled in a tenement house in the San'ya area.
Education
At the age of 11, after four years of studying at primary school, the family finances did not permit Kanae's schooling to continue. He became an apprentice wood engraver and mastered Western techniques of tonal gradation in the workshop of Sakurai Torakichi in Shiba. His training focused on book and newspaper illustration, and included letterpress printing and photoengraving. Kanae completed his apprenticeship at the age of 18, followed by an obligatory year of service with Sakurai. He secretly enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1902, where he studied yōga Western-style painting. From 1912 to 1916 Kanae was in France, studying in Paris in the Academie Julian.
To pay for school, Kanae worked odd printing jobs for employers such as the Hochi Shimbun newspaper, and from February 1903 lodged at the home of his friend Ishii Hakutei. Kanae joined a group of friends in July 1904 on a trip to Chōshi in Chiba Prefecture, where they stayed near the mouth of the Tone River. There he made a sketch of a fisherman dressed in ceremonial clothing overlooking a harbor. When he returned, he used the sketch as the basis of a wood engraving.
Hakutei noticed the print and had it published in the July issue of the literary magazine Myōjō. In a column in the issue, Ishii promoted the print as revolutionary, as it had been done as a means of painterly spontaneous self-expression, and used methods Ishii associated with ukiyo-e traditions. Soon the style Ishii dubbed tōga became a popular topic within Myōjō circles. That was to grow into the sōsaku-hanga ("creative prints") movement.
In summer 1905 Kanae visited his parents in Nagano, where he produced the oil painting "Mosquito Net", the earliest of his oil paintings to be made public. That September Kanae, Hakutei and Tsuzurō Ishii, and some other friends founded the short-lived magazine Heitan in which they published a number of their prints. It was in Heitan that the word hanga first appeared. The word was used interchangeably with tōga until the magazine came to an end in April 1906; thereafter tōga fell out of use and hanga went on to become the modern Japanese word for prints in general. He took work at Rakuten Kitazawa's Tokyo Puck, a cartoon humor magazine patterned after the American Puck.
Kanae felt disappointed at hand-printing's gradual loss of prestige in Japan; to revive interest he wrote a four-part series of articles in 1907 for the art magazine Mizu-e examing a wide variety of printing media and techniques. With Hakutei and Morita Tsunetomo he founded the important art and literature magazine 'Hosun', which promoted among many other things contemporary Westernising prints. Kanae's contributions included his own prints, haiku poetry, and the carving of printing blocks for the designs of others.
He set off on the Tango Maru from Kobe on July 6, 1912, and fifty-three days later landed in Marseilles. While on board he made what was likely the first of the prints his father was to sell for him by subscription: titled "Wild Chickens", it depicted three Chinese prostitutes with bound feet inspired by prostitutes he saw when he passed through Shanghai. He printed it in Paris.
Upon arrival, Kanae contacted the painter Sanzo Wada, who had been in Paris since 1907. Wada introduced him to Kunishirō Mitsutani, and Kanae soon moved into a studio next to Mitsutani's. He found French difficult to master and associated mostly with expatriate Japanese artists such as Ryūzaburō Umehara and Sōtarō Yasui. His closest friend there was Misei Kosugi, a contributor to Hōsun who arrived in March 1913 to spend a year traveling Europe.
The war drove him from Paris to London where he stayed for four months, much of it sick with bronchitis. He returned to Paris on January 11, 1915, but work was scarce and the museums were closed. He resolved to return to Japan the following spring but first moved with a group of Japanese compatriots to Lyon where he found work that brought in enough money for a trip to Italy in March 1916 to see the Renaissance masterpieces. Upon returning to Lyon he finally prepared to go back to Japan.
The least expensive route for Kanae to Japan was through Russia. He set off from Paris on June 30, 1916 via England, Norway, and Sweden. In Moscow he met the Japanese consul and the social critic Noburu Katagami; the latter introduced him to proletarian art and encouraged him to visit Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy's home which he had made into a farmers' school. Kanae visited the Moscow Kustar' Museum, which had exhibited peasant arts and crafts since 1885. He praised its sturdy quality and ethnic design, and lamented that industrialization had brought about a degradation in its perceived value and was threatening its survival. An exhibition of children's art impressed Kanae with its free expressiveness.
Kanae returned to Japan in December 1916 and took over Sakurai's struggling printing company, which he renamed Seiwadō. In autumn 1917 he had seventeen yōga oil paintings displayed at the Nihon Bijutsuin's Inten exhibition. The same year he married Ieko Kitahara, had an instruction book on oil painting published, and finished a number of prints whose subscriptions had been paid for.
In 1919 Kanae founded the Japan Children's Free Drawing Association and held its first exhibition. The public was impressed by its democratic ideals, as the idea of democratic education was gaining momentum in Japan during the Taishō period. Kanae propounded the importance of teaching students freedom, without which they cannot grow, and denigrated the tradition of teaching drawing through copying. He promoted those ideas in 1921 with the book "Free Drawing Education" and the monthly magazine "Education of Arts and Freedom." Kanae's methods were widely adopted, and it became common for teachers to take students outdoors to draw from nature. Those ideas did not escape criticism, and the rise of militarism in Japan put an end to Kanae's movement in 1928; it was not to be revived until after World War II.
Later in 1919 Kanae moved to Ueda, the mountainous Nagano village where his parents lived. He secured funding from the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Agriculture, and Mitsubishi to set up a school that December to teach to the rural population arts and crafts skills they could use to augment their incomes during the long winter months as part of a peasant art movement that combined creativity and utility, inspired by the peasant crafts he had seen in Russia. In 1923 Kanae established the Japan Peasant Art Institute which expanded throughout the country with the help of increased government funding in 1925.
Kanae turned his focus from printmaking to painting. He was a founding member in 1922 of the Shunyōkai Association for painters who wished to maintain connections with Japanese traditions in the face of the Westernization of academic painting in Japan. He was editor of the association's members' magazine Atorie. He continued to promote the work of print artists and the legitimacy of prints as art. In 1924 Kanae travelled to Taiwan for a month to observe local folk craft and advise the government on how to develop the industry. The utilitarian craftwork of the aboriginal Taiwanese people impressed him beyond his expectations.
In 1935 Kanae settled in Tokyo and returned to painting full-time. He produced a number of oils and watercolours that were exhibited in January 1940 at the Mitsukoshi gallery. While at by Lake Haruna in Gunma Prefecture in 1942 Kanae suffered a cerebral hemorrhage which partially paralyzed him and hindered his ability to paint. He continued to paint as much as he could for the rest of his life, hindered by war shortages, and turned to watercolour when oil painting was too demanding under his disability. In spring 1943 he moved to Ueda in Nagano where he spent his remaining years. He died on October 8, 1946 undergoing surgery for a volvulus at the Nisshindō hospital in Ueda.
The police suspected Kanae of socialist sympathies as he had brought the idea from Russia.
Views
Kanae imagined himself a realist and was distressed at the avant-garde that was coming to dominate the European art world; he found it difficult to comprehend and reconcile it with his understanding of a realist ideal in Western art.
Membership
In 1908 - 1911 Kanae belonged to the Bohemian 'Pan' Society, which became suspected by the police of socialist activities. In June 1918 Kanae co-founded the Japan Creative Print Cooperative Society with lithographer Kazuma Oda, etcher Takeo Terasaki, and woodblock artist Kogan Tobari. He was also a founding member in 1922 of the Shunyōkai Association.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
When an idea excited him he would bury himself in it. Sacrifice meant nothing. It was the same with creative hanga, his school, and his free-art movement. He was a selfless man, a passionate man, a man of great sensitivity. I guess if I had to describe him in one word it would be — artist.
Interests
Artists
He liked the works of Renoir and Sisley, and Puvis de Chavannes, admired the paintings of Cézanne, but denied any connection between them and those of the Cubists whose works he denigrated; he wrote that only one in three thousand paintings of Matisse were good.
Connections
Kanae had wanted to marry Mitsu Ishii, but her family forbade it — especially her mother and brother. In 1917 he married Ieko Kitahara.