The freshness, freedom and fearlessness of Yoshitoshi's woodblock prints make his works appear current, writes Aidan Dunne
Japanese coloured woodblock prints stand as a remarkable cultural achievement. In their most accomplished form they appeared first just after the midpoint of the 18th century, when Suzuki Harunobu refined a method of making exceptionally subtle colour prints from multiple blocks of wood. Woodblock had already proved to be the ideal medium for ukiyo-e, or pictures of "the floating world". Throughout the following years, a number of artists came to excel at and refine the techniques, producing works that amazed Western artists and collectors when they subsequently encountered them.
Harunobu, Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi and Hiroshiga all created numerous masterpieces of woodblock printing. Yet even during the working lifetimes of the latter few artists, by the mid-19th century the golden age of woodblock printing was fading fast. The more indecent subject matter, central to ukiyo-e, was restricted through censorship, and the extraordinary technical expertise was disappearing with the incursions of modernity. Other fashions and technologies elbowed aside the traditional methods, styles and imagery. So that during the latter part of his extraordinarily productive career, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, the artist featured in the Chester Beatty's forthcoming exhibition One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, was something of an anachronism, fighting a rearguard action on behalf of a disappearing artform.
Yoshitoshi lived during Japan's forced, traumatic modernisation, as it opened up to western trade and influences after the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853, the same year Yoshitoshi signed his first print. He was apprenticed to Kuniyoshi.
He was born in 1839, in Edo. Aged three, he was banished from his home by his stepmother, but was raised by an uncle who treated him well. His early work was extremely violent and gory, something that has been linked to his early troubles and his several mental collapses, except that, as commentators readily point out, sex and violence were absolute staple subjects of woodblock print-making, and there was a huge market to be satisfied.
In any case, Yoshitoshi's inner demons made life difficult for him, and his lovers did not have an easy time of it either. Two women - Okoto and, later, Oraku - sold possessions to subsidise him, and both took the desperate step of contracting themselves to work in brothels.
YET, TO JUDGE by his voluminous output, Yoshitoshi was hardly lacking in energy and talent. In the last decade of his life he functioned within a relatively stable, productive framework, running a workshop with dozens of apprentices and settling into an amicable marriage with Sakamaki Taiko, who was apparently tolerant of his waywardness.
It was during this period that he produced One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, together with much else. This series of portraits, based on episodes from Chinese and Japanese legends, is loosely linked by the presence of the moon in various phases. Without a doubt, Yoshitoshi was a brilliant artist. While he almost single-handedly preserved the traditional woodblock techniques, that does not mean that his work is nostalgic or backward-looking. On the contrary, it is clearly open to widely diverse influences, absorbing aspects of Western art and exploiting any and all pictorial possibilities that came his way.
All of which gives it a surprisingly fresh, current look. In his beautifully observed prints he seems to anticipate manga comics and action cinema. He enjoys an acrobatic freedom of viewpoint and angle that leaves western artists, even impressionist and post-impressionist rebels, back at the starting blocks. He handles colour with dazzling verve and his sense of design is excellent - and fearless.
All of which make this exhibition, from the Museum of International Folk Art in New Mexico, essential viewing. Yoshitoshi, alas, suffered another mental collapse towards the end of his life, which came when he was only 53, in 1892. His death poem celebrates the moon: Holding back the night/ With its growing brilliance/ The summer moon.
One Hundred Aspects of the Moon: Japanese woodblock prints by Yoshitoshi, a collection formed by the late Else and Joseph Chapman and lent by the Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of New Mexico, opens next Friday at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle. Tel: 01-4070764. www.cbl.ie