長谷川潔

Hasegawa Kiyoshi was born on December 9, 1891 (Meiji 24) in Yokohama (present-day Nishi-ku Goshoyamachō). His father was the Yokohama Branch manager of the First National Bank, Japan’s first modern bank founded by Shibusawa Eiichi, as well as a literatus who loved calligraphy, painting, and antiques. His father taught him about how to read the Analects and the colors of ink that occur in the rubbings used as models for calligraphy practice. This contributed to Hasegawa’s aesthetic receptivity. After Hasegawa’s father died when Hasegawa was eleven and his mother when he was seventeen, he studied drawing under Kuroda Seiki at the Aoibashi Yōga Kenkyūjo (Aoibashi Western-style Painting Institute), and oil painting under Okada Saburōsuke and Fujishima Takeji at the Hongō Yōga Kenkyūjo (Hongō Western-style Painting Institute). Around 1912 he began making his own woodblock prints, drawing the designs and carving the blocks himself. Then from 1913 through 1915 he and Nagase Yoshirō created the cover illustrations for the literary society magazine “Seihai” (title changed to “Kamen,” Chūkōkan). From 1914 through 1917 he prepared woodblock print cover illustrations for the “tanka” poetry magazine “Suiyō.” In 1916 Hasegawa, Nagase Yoshirō, and Hiroshima Shintarō (Kōho) formed Japan’s first printmakers group, the Nihon Hanga Kurabu (Japan Print Club), and they held a Sōsaku Hanga exhibition. His freshly conceived woodblock prints, such as “Le vent (d’après une poésie de Yeats) (Wind [after a Poem by Yeats])” (1915, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, et al.) and “L'après-midi d'un faune (Églogue de Stéphane Mallarmé) (Afternoon of the Faun [Pastoral Poem by Stéphane Mallarmé])” (1916, Yokohama Museum of Art, et al.), along with the group of prints published by Onchi Kōshirō and other members in the poetry and print society magazine “Tsukuhaé,” show the rich breadth of Sōsaku Hanga’s initial period. It is worth noting that prior to traveling to France in 1918, Hasegawa experimented with his own woodblock print techniques. “Graminée” (Gramineae) (1916, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) is representative of his gold printing on indigo-dyed paper (“konshi kinzuri”). This technique takes hints from decorated sutras that date back to the Heian period and he also used it in his bookbinding design. On the other hand, “Kaigan no Shuppansen” (Sailboat by the Shore) (1918, Yokohama Museum of Art) is typical of his “bokashizuri” modulated gradations printing style. Hasegawa noted the three-dimensional effects possible with this technique used by Hokusai, Kunitora, and other Edo period ukiyo-e artists, and began using it in his own works. Hasegawa’s work in Japan reached its peak with the binding and illustrations for Hinatsu Kōnosuke’s first poetry collection, “Tenshin no shō” (1917, Kōfūkan Shoten). Hinatsu and Hasegawa were both fascinated by the mysterious. This book born from the resonance between their poetry and pictures make it one of the famous art books of the Taishō period. Hasegawa learned intaglio techniques from his teacher Okada Saburōsuke and Bernard Leach who was then in Japan. When he made small experimental prints in that medium, he decided to go to France to properly study intaglio techniques. He traveled through the US and arrived in France in April 1919. He recuperated from the long journey in the south of France. As he continued to make woodcuts and oil paintings, he sought to revive mezzotint (“manière noire”) printing, an old intaglio technique that had fallen out of favor. He went in search of the equipment needed, read old technical manuals, and began a trial and error process. In 1925 he displayed mezzotint landscape prints in his first solo show, “Exposition Kiyoshi-Hasegawa Gravures – dessins – aquarelles,” at the Nouvel Essor, Paris gallery. These works did not have the traditional mezzotint fine dot engraved background, but rather used a form of intersecting line background he developed himself. The landscapes he created in this completely new form of simplified, light-dark contrast mezzotint immediately raised the Paris art circle’s opinion of Hasegawa. In 1926 he was selected as a Print Division member of the Salon d’Automne. In 1930, he entered numerous intaglio prints such as “Pont Alexandre Ⅲ et dirigeable français (Alexandre III Bridge and French Airship),” (mezzotint) in the First Aeronautics and the Art, international exhibition held at the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, and received the First Prize of Minister of Aeronautics. The “L’estampe japonaise moderne et ses origines” exhibition (1934, Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris) that he organized as the Paris representative of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai and a Japanese Ministry of Education contract employee was a huge success. The following year the French government awarded Hasegawa the Legion of Honor award. Around that same time the almost fifty illustrations he produced over the course of seven years for the deluxe limited edition French translation of “Taketori Monogatari” (“La Légende de Demoiselle de Lumière,” Société du livre d’art, 1933, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto et al.) stand as proof of his excellence with the oldest, extremely difficult intaglio technique, engraving with a burin. His display of works in Japan began in 1930 at the Shūn’yōkai, and then starting in 1932 at the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai exhibitions, which he continued sporadically until 1969. When World War II broke out in 1939, most Japanese artists in France chose to return to Japan, but Hasegawa stayed in Paris. It was around this difficult time that the revelatory experience of a tree talking to him led to his creation of a work which can be called a portrait of a tree, “A Tree (An Elm Tree)” (1941, drypoint, Yokohama Museum of Art, et al.). All that exists in the natural world is of equal value, and if you align your wavelengths, then you will hear the sounds of all things. This revelation greatly transformed Hasegawa’s attitude towards creating art. In the final days of the war, Hasegawa was imprisoned as a Japanese national at the Camp de Drancy, and this was both a physical and mental blow for Hasegawa. After the war he continued to create engravings and etchings on tree, window, plants, and flower themes. In the latter half of the 1950s he began to concentrate on mezzotint still-lifes. He changed his method, shifting from his intersecting line ground to the traditional fine dot engraved ground. He also contrived different ways of making the ground of his copper plates and blending oil-based inks, creating highly finished works with such gradations that convey the famous Chinese Tang dynasty ink painting phrase, “all five colors are in black.” His motifs, each with their own meaning, whether small birds, hourglasses, dolls, glass balls, or ivy leaves, are arranged in strictly organized compositions. These mezzotint still-lifes reflect Hasegawa’s thoughts about nature and the universe. As opposed to the mystical scenes depicted by Munch and Redon that had fascinated him as a young man, Hasegawa “saw God in daylight.” In other words by depicting the visible things on earth in still-lifes, he expressed the unseen world (nature’s voices, the universe’s rhythms) (Hasegawa Kiyoshi, “Hakuchū ni Kami wo Miru” (saw God in the white of noon), Hakusuisha, 1982, p. 12, p. 14). The motifs float up as three-dimensional forms amid the lacquer black background, and these mezzotint works which reveal a realm of still depths came to be highly regarded, albeit belatedly, in his homeland of Japan. In France the Chalcographie du Musée du Louvre purchased two of the original plates of Hasegawa’s engraved flower pictures. Along with the works of Foujita Tsuguharu, the Louvre sells later editions off those plates. In 1964 he was elected a correspondent member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in 1966 he was awarded L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1972 La Monnaine de Paris issued a portrait medal of Hasegawa, the third Japanese to receive this honor after Katsushika Hokusai and Foujita Tsuguharu. These are just some of the many accolades he received. The mezzotints that brought Hasegawa Kiyoshi to the world’s attention number sixty-seven across the prewar to postwar eras. While the mezzotint is a planar technique, his linear technique works such as engraving, drypoint and etching number around one hundred and eighty works. These clear landscapes and still-lifes characterized by severe line work deserve more appreciation and to be more highly valued. After focusing on the production of his major mezzotints, “Flowers and Aquarium”, “Time (Still Life)” (both 1969, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto et al.), and “Profile” (1970, Yokohama Museum of Art et al.), Camille Quesneville, the printer who had supported Hasegawa’s work since 1926, died suddenly. Hasegawa’s last work was “Bather and Fish” (1971, drypoint, Yokohama Museum of Art et al.). From June to August 1980 a retrospective of his works, which he had spent close to a decade planning, was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. However, he did not make it to Japan for the event. He died on December 13, 1980, at the age of 89. (Sawatari Kiyoko / Translated by Martha J. McClintock) (Published online:2024-03-06)