Graphics: Unknown Masters in Wood

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Just as U.S. servicemen and college students tack pictures of Raquel Welch or travel posters on their walls, so merchants and tradesmen in 18th and 19th century Japan delighted in cheap, mass-produced wood-block prints, or hanga. These genre pictures showed well-known actors or courtesans of the day, picturesque views of Mount Fuji and picaresque travel scenes. They were known as ukiyo-e, literally "pictures of the floating world," because to devout Buddhists everyday existence was a transient stage in man's journey to nirvana. Yet the lasting charm and skill with which the Japanese craftsmen imbued their images have influenced Western artists from Constable onward.

Currently, Los Angeles' U.C.L.A. art gallery is displaying 163 Japanese ukiyo-e hanga, perhaps one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever. Its genesis was the acquisition by U.C.L.A.'s Grunwald Arts Foundation of some 650 prints from the estate of Frank Lloyd Wright. With this as a nucleus, U.C.L.A. commissioned Orientalist Harold P. Stern, assistant director of Washington's Freer Gallery of Art, to assemble a comprehensive survey of Japanese master prints and to write an accompanying book.

Simple but Soul. Wright was one of the floating world's most fervent admirers. He first saw prints at the home of another architect in the 1880s while still an apprentice, eventually amassed 5,000 prints. They were the only decorative art— aside from his own ornamentation— that he proposed for his buildings; even his architectural renderings have an Oriental look. The ukiyo-e "intrigued me and taught me much," he once said. "A Japanese may tell you what he knows in a single drawing, but never will he attempt to tell you all he knows. He is content to lay stress upon a simple element, insignificant enough perhaps, until he has handled it; then the slight means employed touch the soul of the subject so surely that while less would have failed of the intended effect, more would have been profane. The gospel of the elimination of the insignificant preached by the print came home to me in architecture."

Japanese printmakers eliminated the insignificant partly as a matter of economic necessity. The making of a hanga was a laborious process. First, the artist brushed his design onto mulberry paper. Then the drawing was glued to a cherry-wood block. Next, two engravers incised the design upon the block. Several black-and-white prints were made from it, and these were then glued to other blocks that were incised in turn so that each could be used to print a single color. In the early 18th century, print-makers were largely limited to various vegetable-based inks of red and yellow. By the 1740s, greens, blues and grays had been added to the spectrum. The artist Suzuki Harunobu is credited with developing the first nishiki-e, or full-color picture—named for nishiki-e, a richly embroidered brocade.