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Goyo's beautiful woodblock portraits of women are renowned for their combination of traditional Japanese style with a distinctly modern allure.
Five NeedlesBorn in 1880, Hashiguchi Kiyoshi was inspired to choose the creative pseudonym of Goyo by a five-needled pine tree in his father’s yard. (Go is the word for the number five in Japanese, while yo means needle.) Goyo’s father was a samurai, and as an amateur printmaker as well, he encouraged his son’s artistic talents. A painting teacher was hired to provide classical instruction, and Goyo later attended the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1905. He then illustrated novelist Natsume Soseki’s I Am a Cat, which led to further literary collaborations with other well-known Japanese authors such as Junichiro Tanizaki. In 1907, Goyo’s oil painting work received strong praise at the national Bunten show. West Meets East and Vice VersaGoyo’s career began to follow a curious parallel with Japan’s changing attitudes towards Western or European and American culture. Following Commodore Matthew Perry’s first entry into the previously closed-off Japan in 1853, there had been a growing sense of fascination among the Japanese toward Euro-American art, fashions and customs. Conversely, Europeans and Americans would also find Japanese art, fashion and décor to be of great interest. As an artist, Goyo could not help but be intrigued and influenced by European styles of painting. So while Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh found fresh perspectives in the color and forms of Japanese art, Goyo and his contemporaries were contemplating the poses and tones of the French Impressionists, particularly Degas and Renoir’s depiction of women. Shin Hanga and Bijin-GaGoyo would fuse the East-West relationship in his work with the long-revered Japanese art form of vividly colored and detailed woodblock prints. By 1915, there had been a revival of the traditional ukiyo-e woodblock style, as mastered earlier by such artists as Kitagawa Utamaro. By the time that Goyo began making woodblock prints, this form had taken on a new Taisho Era name of shin hanga. Particularly fond of the bijin-ga or “beautiful women” genre, Goyo showed lovely females with a uniquely Japanese allure, yet their poses and actions offered more modern influences. The 1920 print known as Kamisuki, for instance, depicts a young Japanese woman combing her long and lustrous hair. This is an intimate and relaxed view that would not have been shown earlier in Japanese woodblock art, particularly the contentedly natural expression on the woman’s face, and her hair not being bound up in a customary bun. Around this time as well, the Japanese had become more openly accepting of nude female figures through the influence of European painting, and Goyo’s prints would reflect that relaxed attitude. Early Death and LegacyGoyo was an intense perfectionist and insisted on being involved in all aspects of woodblock art, from the design to the actual printing. Such high standards and Goyo’s early death from meningitis at age 41 would unfortunately limit his total number of completed woodblock designs. Furthermore, the blocks or templates for the designs were reportedly destroyed in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, making the availability of Goyo’s originals quite scarce and highly desirable among collectors. Had he lived to produce more woodblock designs or to venture into new forms of art, it seems very likely that Goyo would have achieved even greater works than those he left behind during his too-short career. Sources
The copyright of the article Japanese Artist Hashiguchi Goyo in 20th Century Art is owned by Meg Nola. Permission to republish Japanese Artist Hashiguchi Goyo in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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