Shikō Munakata

Shikō Munakata ( Japanese 棟方志功 , Munakata Shikō ; * September 5, 1903 in Aomori ; † September 13, 1975 ) was a Japanese wood cutter and painter who, as a representative of the Sōsaku-hanga and Mingei movements, used traditional Japanese woodblock prints in the 20th century . Century renewed and realigned to contemporary tendencies in international art.

life and work

Shiko Munakata was born on September 5, 1903 in Aomori, the sixth of 15 children. According to an old family tradition, the father was a blacksmith. After his mother's death in 1920, Munakata worked as a bailiff while drawing and sketching in his spare time. After Munakata saw works by Vincent van Gogh in an illustrated magazine , he began to occupy himself with oil painting . Together with school friends, he founds a group of painters dedicated to the “Western Style” ( Yōga ). His enthusiasm for van Gogh's painting knew hardly any boundaries. In his autobiography , he himself noted that he would have done anything to become like Van Gogh. In September 1924 Munakata went to Tokyo to pursue his career as a painter and indeed achieved his first exhibition successes.

He drew scenes of the city with the destruction of the earthquake of 1923. A painting that had already been made in Aomori is exhibited at the 5th Imperial Art Exhibition - albeit unsuccessfully. Until 1928 his works were rejected at the following exhibitions. In 1925 Munakata worked for the Kyozai publishing agency as an illustrator for about a year . In March an oil painting by him was shown at the 3rd exhibition of the Hakujitsu Group in the newly opened Tokyo Prefecture Museum. Different traditions report that Munakata by the woodcut early summer breeze by Sumio Kawakami was suggested that he saw in 1926, to deal with this artistic technique, which he preferred in the following years. He increasingly came to the conclusion that the numerous groups who wanted to establish an art based on the Western model in Japan could hardly go beyond epigonal approaches. So he decided for himself that the woodcut technique, which is very traditional in Japan, was the appropriate means of expression for him. Munakata, however, was not based on the famous and popular Ukiyo-e style of the 17th to 19th centuries, but rather fell back on much older traditions of Zen Buddhism from the 9th to 11th centuries.

In 1931 the publisher Kuraba Hanga published the book Wedding Zodiac with Munakata's woodcuts. At the same time, 27 oil paintings and seven woodcuts were presented in a first solo exhibition. In the fall of that year, Munakata went on a trip to create the two woodcuts Gardens of Hasegawa Mansion in Kameda: The Inner Garden and The Rear Garden , with which he won the Kokugakai Prize at the 7th Kokugakai Exhibition the following year . The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris and the Museum in Boston purchased his works for the first time. In 1933, Hangeijutsu (The Art of Printing) magazine published a special edition of Munakata's prints. Munakata was represented with several works at the exhibition on contemporary Japanese woodcut, which took place in Paris in the spring of 1934 , and two prints by Munakata were shown at the international art exhibition held in Berlin in 1936 on the occasion of the Olympic Games .

Inspired by Soetsu Yanagi , Munakata began to occupy himself with the Urazaishiki technique, which he later used in his colored woodcuts. The colors are not applied to the front of the print, but with a brush from behind onto the translucent paper, from where they strike through to the front of the sheet. This technique makes it possible to maintain the high-contrast printing effect of the woodcuts and at the same time to achieve a painterly effect.

In 1936 he took part in the art competition on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Berlin with the works “Group Run” and “Citizen Gymnastics”. However, his contributions were not rewarded. - In 1938 he was the first artist to win a prize with a graphic work at the Colorful Exhibition ( The History of the Cormorant ), which made him better known in Japan. In 1941 he received the Saburi Prize as the most important modern artist of the year in Japan for his series Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Shaka . Due to the fighting in the Pacific region during World War II , Munakata and his family were evacuated from Tokyo to Fukumitsu in the central Japanese prefecture of Toyama in April 1945 , where they lived until November 1951. His house in Yoyogi was destroyed in an air raid on Tokyo, with much of the works he had created up to then being lost.

In dealing with the music of Beethoven in 1951 was for the textile manufacturer Soichiro Ohara series to honor Beethoven's 5th Symphony , the same year on the 1st Biennial of São Paulo in Brazil was shown. In 1955 he finally achieved his international breakthrough with his third participation in the São Paulo Biennale . Munakata received first prize in the pressure category, the Luzica Matarazzo medal , for his works Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Shaka and Three Women Ascending , Three Women Descending . A year later he exhibited eleven works at the Venice Biennale and won the Grand Prix for Printmaking with willow in green and flowers in red .

Munakata Museum in Aomori

The following years were filled with numerous trips and exhibitions in Japan, America and Europe. In 1960 his works were shown in a traveling exhibition in Vienna , Braunschweig and Frankfurt am Main , among others . In 1964 he was awarded the Asahi Prize . Munakata has received repeated invitations to give lectures at universities in the United States. On the occasion of the inauguration of a cultural center, for which he had created two murals , his native city of Aomori made him an honorary citizen in 1969. At the world exhibition in Osaka in 1970 he was represented with the two monumental murals Earth, from humanity to the gods and heaven, from the gods to humanity . In the same year he was honored as a person with special cultural merits and was also awarded the Cultural Order. Although his health was increasingly troublesome, Munakata continued to travel extensively and hold exhibitions at home and abroad. The Munakata Foundation was established in October 1973 and the Munakata Museum was opened in Kamakura in 1974 on his 71st birthday . On September 13, 1975, Shiko Munakata succumbed to progressive cancer at his home in Tokyo . Two months later, the Shiko Munakata Art Museum opened in Aomori.

Munakata was highly honored in Japan even after his death in 1975. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, an extensive retrospective of his wood prints took place, which could be seen in the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. In 2002, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art dedicated an exhibition to the artist. In 2004, the municipal art museum Spendhaus Reutlingen showed the work of this extraordinary wood cutter in Germany for the first time in over forty years .

literature

Robert T. Singer, Felice Fischer, Hollis Goodall-Cristante: Munakata Shiko: Japanese Master of the Modern Print. Art Media Resources, 2002, ISBN 978-1-58886-021-7 .
Eva Vorpagel-Redl, Ralf Gottschlich: Japanese Paths to Modernity. Shiko Munakata (1903-1975). Exhibition catalog, Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus, Reutlingen, 2004, ISBN 978-3-933820-65-5 .
Patricia Jane Graham: Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600-2005 . University of Hawaii Press 2007, ISBN 9780824831912 , pp. 222–224 ( excerpt (Google) )
H. Kanehara and Araki (eds): Munakata Shikō - ten , Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki, 1995 (Japanese)
Munakata Shikō Kinenkan (ed.): Shikō (catalog of exhibitions in Japan 1992/93) (Japanese)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Munakata, Shikō
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	棟方志功 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Japanese wood cutter and painter
DATE OF BIRTH	September 5, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH	Aomori Prefecture
DATE OF DEATH	September 13, 1975