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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, September 12, 2004

Exhibit traces poster styles in post-World War II Japan

By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser

Thanks to a gift more than 10 years ago to the University of Hawai'i Department of Art and Art History from the Toppan Printing Co. in Tokyo, posters from post-World War II Japan are featured in this excellent exhibition. The displays were selected by a committee of distinguished graphic designers that included Shigeo Fukuda, the late Ikko Tanaka, Makoto Nakamura, Kazumasa Nagai and Yusaku Kamekura.

Influenced by the Swiss Neue Graphik movement, Ikko Tanaka superimposed a high-contrast photograph of a noh-theater mask over a checkered pattern of mostly subdued colors. A blend of traditional and contemporary elements, this poster marked Tanaka's artistic debut and indicated the direction he would follow.

University of Hawai'i-Manoa Art Department photographs

Organized by decades, the exhibition is a chronicle of the poster form in the service of advertising exhibitions, films, plays and products, as well as a mirror of the times and the preoccupations of Japan's political consciousness.

The ukiyo-e woodblock print — "pictures of the floating world" that originated in the metropolitan culture of Edo (old Tokyo) — flourished from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century and was in many ways the equivalent of the poster in the West.

It was an art closely connected with the pleasures of theaters, restaurants, teahouses, geisha and courtesans. Many prints by artists like Utamaro and Sharaku were in fact posters advertising theater performances and brothels, or "idol" portraits of popular actors and beautiful teahouse girls.

By the end of the 19th century, the tradition was all but dead, but not before it had inspired the Impressionists in Europe, who integrated stylistic elements from Japanese woodcuts into their work.

In the West, the poster owes its existence to lithography, invented around 1800 by an impoverished actor, Aloys Senefelder, who used printer plates of limestone that could be easily reused. Posters then became economically feasible for advertising.

The modern poster dates back to the 1870s, where it was first popularized in France by lithographer, poster designer and painter Jules Cheret.

During the French Belle ƒpoque in the last decade of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th, when high society flourished, posters became a popular craze, with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters all done in the 1890s — "Moulin Rouge" and "Jane Avril" among the most famous — elevating the poster to the ranks of fine art, again inspired by Japanese woodcuts.

The Allied occupation from 1945 to 1952 witnessed profound American involvement in virtually every aspect of life in Japan, forever changing the dynamic between the countries. Japanese graphic designers embraced Western ideas and styles — including the well-established aesthetic of the poster — and ultimately blended the traditions of East and West to produce a rich variety of expression that is effectively documented in the 100 posters on exhibit.

Yoshio Hayakawa's humble 1949 poster for a dressmaking school illustrates the first tentative steps to synthesize a particularly Japanese sensibility with a Western aesthetic vocabulary.

In 1948, what came to be known as the International Typographic Style emerged. Refined at design schools in Zurich and Basel, Switzerland, the style utilized mathematical grids, strict graphic rules and black-and-white photography to provide a clear and logical structure.

This influence can be seen in such early works as Ikko Tanaka's striking "Noh Performance," a bold design from 1958 that serves up a traditional noh theater mask form with international-style panache. His series for the Kanze Noh Theater began in the late 1950s and continued through the 1980s, when he designed one almost every year.

'The Best 100 Japanese Posters: 1945-1989'

University of Hawai'i Art Gallery 2535 McCarthy Mall, University of Hawai'i-Manoa

10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays; noon to 4 p.m. Sundays; closed Saturdays; through Sept. 24.

Free admission, free parking on Sundays

Ruyiki Yamashiro's 1955 "Tree Planting Campaign" — with its repeated use of the kanji (Japanese characters) for "forest" and "grove" to create a pattern suggestive of a forest — similarly succeeds in tapping traditional calligraphic forms in the service of an utterly modern and arresting visual sensibility.

By the 1960s, artists like Tadanori Yokoo were working within the psychedelic aesthetic typified by the works of such Western artists as Peter Max and Milton Glaser. The 1966 theater poster "Koshimaki-osen," with its bold colors and electrified energy, wordlessly communicates the texture of both a specific theatrical event as well as the era's zeitgeist.

Tapping the fine arts is just one way the advertising medium of the poster is raised to the level of high graphic art.

Gan Hosoya's 1967 "Silence — One-Man Photo-Printing Art Exhibition" evokes the surreal work of Rene Magritte. A man stands holding a cloud-covered placard over his face, the clouds seamlessly melting into the background clouds so as to render the figure mysteriously headless.

Criticized for being cold, formal and dogmatic, the International Typographic Style began to lose its energy in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Today's predominant style is known loosely as Post-Modern design, accompanied by a shift from metal to photo typesetting and offset printing. New technical freedom facilitated reinvention of the rules.

Since its expansion onto the international stage at the beginning of the 1960s, the Japanese poster diverged into two very different genres.

The pedestrian street advertising products, often of huge dimensions, rarely produce anything of significant artistic value.

T

Makoto Wada boldly expressed his anger over the Vietnam War. Created for traveling open-air exhibitions in support of the children in the war-torn country, this poster was one of many hand-made, original works created by painters and illustrators.

University of Hawai'i-Manoa Art Department photographs

he so-called image posters, produced at high cost and in small numbers, are not intended to be billboards, but to decorate the boardrooms of corporations or as special gifts. Shown publicly at special exhibitions with prizes awarded for the best examples, they reach a wide public audience as reproductions in magazines.

Even so, some work designed primarily to advertise achieves significant aesthetic dimensions.

A theater poster for "Cherry Orchard" — a 1974 work by designer Ikko Tanaka and artist Haruo Takino — breaks new ground in evoking the psychological resonance of Chekhov's play. In the foreground is a lowering stand of trees, overshadowed by the huge figure of a woman leaning over in grief, a kind of inverse forced perspective.

Graphic designers Keisuke Nagatomo and Seitaro Kuroda collaborate on the 1979 film poster for "The Assassinators," which effectively utilizes a calligraphic thrown-ink design to communicate the film's theme.

Artist Makoto Nakamura and photographer Noriaki Yokosuka's "Shiseido Perfume" poster from 1978 features the close-up eye of top international model Sayoko Yamaguchi and a part of a gold foil fan to present the Japanese ideal of feminine beauty from a new perspective.

To promote Parco, a well known department store in 1979, Faye Dunaway — still hot from "Chinatown" — appears in an exotic Issei Miyake designer dress and stylized makeup, flanked by two pre-pubescent Japanese girls in similar makeup and red wrap dresses that teasingly reveal their nipples.

Designers Eiko Ishioka and photographer Kazumi Kurigami have created an image at once sacred and profane: Kwannon, the revered bodhisattva, symbol of divine mercy, and also a perverse procuress from hell, topped by the tongue-in-cheek caption: "Can West Wear East?"

The posters also illustrate the changing face of post-war Japan as it grappled with its political and ideological identity and embraced particular causes, especially the anti-war movement and nuclear proliferation in the 1980s.

"Hiroshima Appeals: 1983," created by the Japan Graphic Designers Association for the Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation, speaks softly and poignantly and powerfully to the memory of the victims of unspeakable horror: plummeting from the sky are iridescent butterflies, falling to earth, consumed in flames.

Masuteru Aobu's peace poster "The End" and Yosuke Kawamura's "Amnesty," both from 1980, likewise overtly and successfully communicate — as does all effective art — by virtue of the simplicity of their concepts, the clarity and brevity of their presentation, and their critical sense to know and understand their audience.

For the 1985 poster promoting Buddhist domestic shrines — "Respect Your Ancestors" — internationally recognized graphic designer Makoto Saito and Kazumi Kurigami have created a striking poster through the bold use of negative space: the image of a blue bone against a white expanse, the Chinese character for "life" upside down at the lower left of the poster.

By the end of the 1980s, poster art stood on the edge of a new technology that has, once more, transformed the aesthetic dimensions of the work: the computer and digital imagery.

A fitting tribute to the eclipse of the by-hand, paste-up techniques is artist Masatoshi Toda's "Vivre 21," a composite motif of an image of female eroticism to promote a fashion department store: the indelible image of deep red lips, a drop of crimson trickling out against stark white skin.

Guest writer David C. Farmer wrote The Advertiser's Sunday art column from 1975 to 1976. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's degree in Asian and Pacific art history.