Tōshi Yoshida was a Japanese printmaking artist associated with the sōsaku-hanga movement, and son of shin-hanga artist Hiroshi Yoshida. The movement’s principles involved the idea that a single artist would draw, carve, and print his own works, rather than dividing the tasks for assistants to carry out.
Background
Born in Tokyo, the eldest son of renowned painter and woodblock print artist Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950) and artist Fujio Yoshida (1887-1987), Toshi Yoshida was raised immersed in art. Branching into other art media, later generations of Yoshida artists have continued to burnish the Yoshida name. From as early as the age of three, Toshi Yoshida showed exceptional talent in woodblock print design, amazing and delighting his father. Together father and son traveled widely in East Asia, completing sketching tours of India, Burma, and Ceylon by the time the younger Yoshida was twenty.
Education
Toshi first studied the techniques of woodblock printing in his father's studio, and the subject matter of his earlier prints is reminiscent of Hiroshi's work. After attending the School of the Pacific Arts Association, seeking new subject matter, Toshi Yoshida resumed travels which took him to the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Antarctica.
Career
Yoshida's artistic career was a long struggle between fidelity to his father's legacy and freedom from it. Hiroshi Yoshida, a shin-hanga landscape artist, dictated Tōshi's early artistic development. In 1926, Tōshi chose animals as his primary subjects to distinguish himself from his father, who was a landscape printmaker. However, in the 1930s, Tōshi started making landscape paintings and prints similar to his father's works. Father and son traveled together and even painted side by side. From 1930 to 1931, Hiroshi and Tōshi traveled to India, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Calcutta, and Burma.
Yoshida's adult career began under adverse circumstances. Yoshida was still an apprentice in the Yoshida family system. He had little, if any, artistic autonomy from his father. 1936 was the beginning of military dictatorship, under which art was under censorship. In 1943, Yoshida produced oil paintings that depict factory workers and civilians engaging in war production. After the war, because of economic hardship, Yoshida published seventeen landscape works in 1951 for American personnel and their wives.
The death of his father in 1950 marked Tōshi's total break from his past and from naturalism. In 1952, Yoshida began a series of abstract woodcuts, influenced by his brother, Hodaka Yoshida. In 1953, Tōshi traveled to the United States, Mexico, London, and the Near East. He made presentations in thirty museums and galleries in eighteen states. From 1954 to 1973, Yoshida made three hundred nonobjective prints.
In 1971, Yoshida returned to his innate affinity for animals and focused on birds and animals again. His "Humming Bird and Fuchsia" in 1971 was a prelude to the African works that he began the following year. From 1971 to 1994, until the last years of his life, Tōshi worked almost exclusively on animal prints. Tōshi was also a children's book illustrator. He wrote his own short stories and made illustrations in the "Animal Picture Book" series. The artist died at 93 years old on July 1, 1995 in Tokyo, Japan. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Toshi's artistic style cannot be easily summarized, because he was constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of the woodblock medium. His work ranges from realistic landscapes to imaginative abstract designs to detailed portraits of animals in their environments.
Quotations:
“...it was an easy – I suppose inevitable – step to abstraction, but it was a step my father could never approve. Still I could not ignore the movement of the times and I began to break away from my former realistic approach two or three years after the war.”
Connections
In 1940 Toshi married Kiso Yoshida (née Katsura) and they soon had five sons.