Modern Marvel

Munakata Shiko: Japanese Master of the Modern PrintThrough Nov. 10, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, 215-763-8100a

By the time Munakata Shiko (1903-1975) started making moku-hanga (Japanese woodblock prints), the art form was considered rather old-fashioned and its golden period was over. It was Munakata’s intention, in fact, to become a painter like van Gogh, his idol, but he was gently encouraged by teachers and peers to apply his creative efforts to printmaking. (His extreme nearsightedness made printmaking a better choice: photographs show him carving wood boards with his face just a few inches away from the surface.) By the end of his career he had reinvented moku-hanga -- by investing it with emotional sensitivity, energy and scale -- and although he had few imitators, his prints were widely admired and respected. Now the first major full-scale retrospective of Munakata’s work, timed to celebrate the upcoming centenary of his birth, will make a serious reassessment of his work possible.

It's fitting that the show opens in Philadelphia. Munakata had a special relationship with the printmaking community here, and the show contains several lithographs that he made with Arthur Flory and his students at Tyler in 1959. The work, including more than 120 prints, paintings, calligraphy and ceramics, is divided into two parts, and installed in the Japanese Galleries and the Berman and Stieglitz Galleries. The second floor Japanese Galleries contain mostly small, intimate prints and drawings, like the color woodcut Self-Portrait with Joy (1963; printed 1974). Munakata portrays himself surrounded by the things he loves best in life -- his chisels, some flowers, Beethoven's music, etc.; a bright cacophony where he seems to be merging with the world around him. Hara: A Line at the Foot of Mt. Fuji (1963; printed 1964), a stark and minimal vision of a mountain in lush black ink, could almost have been made by a different artist. But this is typical of Munakata, who believed "adherence to a single style of art means artistic death."

Munakata was an avid and sophisticated reader of literature and poetry, and his Some Poems from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a series of woodblock prints made in 1959, are full of enthusiasm and affection. The letters had to be carved in reverse because of the relief printing process, so he inventively transformed many of the letters into symmetrical forms to make printing easier. In Praise of Mt. Fuji: Compositions on Kusano Shinpei's Poems, 1965-66, is a very large screen with 13 small prints mounted on it, each made in diverse styles to suit the poem it illustrates. It shows Munakata's ingenious use of screens to display his prints -- a novelty, though screens have historically been used to display paintings, poems and calligraphy. These prints also demonstrate Munakata's innovations with color. He often applied color to the back of a print in order not to overwhelm the text or image, giving it a delicate, luminous quality, with colors like stained glass or Kool-Aid.

The Berman and Stieglitz Galleries illuminate the development of Munakata's most monumental work. In Praise of Great Joy: On Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1952; printed later), inspired by the symphony and a book on Celtic lettering and patterns, consists of two prints, each over 10 feet long. The paper is completely covered with a dense web of textures and patterns partially concealing 27 women dancing for joy. Like Matisse's women, they're representations of pure spirit, but Munakata gives them the earthy physicality of tattooed women. A pair of enormous prints mounted on screens, The Mountain: Dedicated to My Virtuous Parents and The Sea: Dedicated to My Virtuous Parents, made in 1958, describes a powerful and emotionally fraught landscape. Here Munakata over-inked the blocks to produce an extremely dark, deep space and, to create even more density, he added ink to the back of the paper. "There are 27 shades of black," wrote van Gogh, and I saw them all in this remarkable set of screens.

Spirituality of many types (Zen, Shinto, secular poetry) was a recurrent theme from the beginning of Munakata's career, and by the end it was completely ingrained in his ideas and processes. Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Sakyamuni (1939; printed 1948) is printed from a row of 12 rare and precious magnolia boards on two large screens about 5 feet by 10 feet. It's no coincidence that Munakata selected a spiritual subject, the personalities and expressions of the 12 holy men, to create from this precious material. The character of each board and the grain of the wood are visible. Inspired by Shinto beliefs, which find divinity in trees, Munakata's deep respect for the spirit of the wood is expressed in his monumental woodcuts.

I love the generous spirit of this artist, the way he struggled to share life's pleasures with others. In the process he made a completely original body of work that, although appreciated during his lifetime, is now ready to inspire a new generation of artists as it travels to seven museums throughout the U.S. and Japan.